Have you heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? The Pacific Garbage Patch, AKA the ‘trash vortex’ is a large accumulation of marine debris found in the North Pacific ocean. It is actually a combination of the Western Garbage Patch and the Eastern Garbage Patch, where it spans from Japanese to North America’s coasts. Most of this trash originates from land-based activities in North America and Asia.
The debris spins to form a vortex because it collects in a convergence zone. This is where warm waters from the South Pacific and cooler waters from the Arctic meet and circulate into a gyre. The center of this gyre, much like an eye of a hurricane, is relatively calm and stable. This area tends to accumulate the most debris as rotating currents pulls things towards it’s center.
Most of these floating materials are plastic, which aren’t at all biodegradable. When you hear the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, you may picture a large floating island of plastic – but in reality this is not the case. So then what happens to the plastic? Over time, the sun’s rays causes these plastic bottles/caps/bags to break down into smaller pieces through a process called photodegredation. The result is a “milky” ocean filled with microplastics amongst larger pieces of debris.
Nobody has figured out the true size of the Pacific Garbage Patch yet due to the massive scale of the subtropical gyre. Oceanographes and ecologists discovered that roughly 70% of this debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean – making it impossible to measure the scale of this oceanic debris.
Obviously we know this is no great treat for marine life, but in what way does this impact them? And what does their impact mean for us in the future? Land and marine animals will often mistake plastics as food and consume them by accident. Loggerhead sea turtles are confusing plastic bags as jellies (their favorite foods), while Albatrosses are feeding resin pellets to chicks – mistaking it as fish eggs. They die of starvation or ruptured organs in the process. Marine mammals, most often seals, are getting caught in plastic fishing nets and drowning because of this – a phenomenon known as “ghost fishing”. Marine debris disturbs food webs also, as micro plastics collect near the surfaces of water and block off sunlight for plankton and algae, which disrupts their growth. Without these oceanic producers, marine populations will decrease – which means costs of seafood are likely to go up if the trend continues. What else does plastic do? Sadly, there’s more to it. Plastics will leach out and absorb pollutants such as BPA and PCBs. These chemicals can enter the food chain when consumed by marine life.
So far, no nation has taken the responisbility to clean up it up because it is so far from any country’s coastline. Moore, the man who discovered the patch, says that it would “bankrupt any country” who tries to clean it. On the bright side, growing numbers of individuals and organizations (such as the Plastic Pollution Coalition and Plastic Oceans Foundation) dedicate themselves to keep the garbage patch from growing. The best ways, of course, is by limiting uses of plastics and increasing the usage of biodegradable materials. In the end, our planet is all we have.
