Pacific garbage patch still growing
A vast collection of rubbish swirling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is now twice the size of the USA and is still growing, according to recent research by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF) in California.
During a five-week research expedition that ended in February, a team of scientists led by oceanographer and AMRF founder Charles Moore took samples from the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, which stretches from about 500 nautical miles (926 kilometres) off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. The researchers are now analysing these samples in a laboratory, but according to the results of an expedition last September, the area contains five times more rubbish than in 1997, when Moore first began his research.
Consisting largely of partially decomposed consumer waste such as plastic bags, bottles, fast-food wrappers and toys, the rubbish moves as a single entity because of the presence of the North Pacific Gyre. This slowly rotating vortex draws in flotsam and jetsam, 80 per cent of which is believed to have originated from land, circulating it for decades and causing major problems for marine life.
According to the UN Environment Program, more than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year after inadvertently consuming debris from the patch.
Moore and his colleagues at AMRF warn that the rubbish patch will double in size over the next decade unless consumers cut back on their use of plastic. ‘We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic,’ he said. ‘There’s no evidence it will disappear within 1,000 years.’
June 2008
During a five-week research expedition that ended in February, a team of scientists led by oceanographer and AMRF founder Charles Moore took samples from the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, which stretches from about 500 nautical miles (926 kilometres) off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. The researchers are now analysing these samples in a laboratory, but according to the results of an expedition last September, the area contains five times more rubbish than in 1997, when Moore first began his research.
Consisting largely of partially decomposed consumer waste such as plastic bags, bottles, fast-food wrappers and toys, the rubbish moves as a single entity because of the presence of the North Pacific Gyre. This slowly rotating vortex draws in flotsam and jetsam, 80 per cent of which is believed to have originated from land, circulating it for decades and causing major problems for marine life.
According to the UN Environment Program, more than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year after inadvertently consuming debris from the patch.
Moore and his colleagues at AMRF warn that the rubbish patch will double in size over the next decade unless consumers cut back on their use of plastic. ‘We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic,’ he said. ‘There’s no evidence it will disappear within 1,000 years.’
June 2008
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