Since then he has been passionate about investigating it and creating awareness about its significance - and the significance of the Eastern Garbage Patch is enormous. Moore first discovered the garbage patch when he crossed the Pacific in 1997 after competing in the Transpacific Yacht Race. Captain Charles Moore founded the Algalita foundation and commands its research vessel, the Alguita. The foundation’s fieldwork has revealed an ever-growing synthetic sea where particles concentrate by season, trash commutes in the currents from far-off places, and plastic outweighs zooplankton, retarding ocean life. I learned about the Eastern Garbage Patch, also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, from studies the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, based in Long Beach, California, has conducted while trolling it seven times over the past decade. Around and around: bottles, plastic bags, fishnets, clothing, lighters, and myriad other man-made items, held until they disintegrate, make their way to distant seas, or merely bob among the waves before washing up on someone’s beach.
#Pacific garbage patch series#
This rubbish-strewn patch floats within the North Pacific Gyre, the center of a series of currents several thousand miles wide that create a circular effect, ensnaring trash and debris. After flying from Los Angeles to the Big Island of Hawaii, I hitched a ride on the research vessel Alguita as it did a shakedown cruise, readying to set sail to traverse the massive Eastern Garbage Patch, which lies between there and California. He hopes that by revealing what’s going on “below the surface” he can “inspire people to stop using single-use plastic and to rethink the way we live.I had never been so excited to see garbage in my life. Ben Lecomte says his face-to-face experience with the Pacific’s garbage has prompted him to reduce his consumption of plastic. She points to companies such as Filtrol that are developing filters that remove microfibers from washing machine outflows.Īwareness-raising is another priority. It is hard to conceive of a way to remove microfibers from the ocean on a grand scale, says Royer, but she hopes that scientific data will prompt policymakers to legislate for technical fixes to prevent the fibers entering the ocean in the first place. Research on the impact of microfibers is in its infancy and “we don’t know if that would have health consequences for people who eat the fish,” she says. “Finding microfibers would show that they are not always excreted by the fish but can pass through cell walls and get lodged in flesh,” she says. Thousands of people have stopped flying because of climate change Scattered into the air or flushed down water pipes, the fibers eventually reach the ocean via waterways. When laundered, a standard, six-kilogram load of synthetic fiber clothing releases “about 700,000 microfibers,” she says. “Most of our clothes nowadays are made out of different types of plastic including polyester, nylon, Lycra, polypropylene … and they shed microfibers at all times,” says Royer. Read: Bringing back bison to restore America’s lost prairie She is examining the samples for plastic microfibers – microscopically small plastic threads that are a mounting cause for concern. The crew sent samples of seawater and slices of fish flesh to Sarah-Jeanne Royer, a marine plastics expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the expedition’s lead scientist on dry land.
“It was really disturbing,” says McWhirter, “but we still ate it.” Plastic fragments were not visible in most of the dissected fish, but one mahi mahi had a piece of plastic in its stomach that was macro – not micro – in size. The stomach of a mahi mahi fish, caught by the crew, contained two small fish, three squid beaks and a large piece of vexar - a plastic commonly used by the shellfish farming industry.