Giant Ocean-Trash Vortex Attracts Explorers
It may lack the allure of the North Pole or Mount Everest, but a Pacific Ocean trash dump twice the size of Texas is this summer's hot destination for explorers. The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii, is created by ocean currents that pick up millions of tons of the world's discarded plastic.
As much as 10 percent of the 260 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in the oceans, much of it in trash vortices like the Pacific garbage patch.
This summer, two separate expeditions will set sail for the patch to document the scope of the problem and call global attention to disastrous ocean pollution.
"Every single person who has ever been to a beach anywhere has seen plastic, even in the remotest of places," said Doug Woodring, head of the ocean-health nonprofit Project Kaisei that will launch two boats next week...
We must not be amazed of this newly formed “continent” in the Pacific Ocean. We should be terrified. A lot of people haven't heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is basically a patch of garbage, mostly decomposing plastic, in the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean Gyre – a gyre is an ocean area that several currents collide in to form a circular area – that is estimated to be up to twice the size of Texas. It is awful scenes like it that would make conservation and recycling seem worth some short term loans at least to vamp up. The size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will take a lot more than payday loans no faxing to clean up, and we must take better care of this earth.