Oceanic Gyre: A Garbage Patch

On our survey of the North Shore beaches we find most are quite clean. But there are spots where one sees an accumulation of gunk, mostly plastic. Often it’s small, fractured pieces that pile up like shells at the top of the wave lap. Sometimes it’s bigger chunks, bottles, parts and pieces of net. There are, in fact, gigantic ghost nets floating around the Pacific, unhooked from boats but still catching and killing fish. Located in the ocean between Hawaii and California is a gigantic gyre, a circular pattern of currents in this ocean basin which is, astoundingly, the size of Texas. The gyre captures debris and swirls it around in this huge circle and when the gyre drifts south, as it has recently, it drops trash on Hawaii’s beaches endangering reefs, seals, birds and turtles. Out in the ocean eyewitness Charles Moore wrote in a story in Natural History Magazine: "I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments."
Plastic breaks up over time, but it doesn’t break down. It may degenerate eventually to the molecular level but it is still plastic and will contaminate the marine life that ingests it. Eighty per cent of plastic debris found in the oceans is from land based discharge. According toThe Plastic Debris, Rivers to Sea Project “our oceans have become the virtual garbage can for the developed and developing world.”