To The Gyre

By Ericka Staples on January 21, 2010 From Restoration campaign

My one-year-old niece—who just very recently started walking - already knows how and when to totter to the litterbin to put junk in its appropriate place. If Kiana already knows where trash goes, it surely cannot be that difficult for the rest of us to follow suit.

Apparently, this is not the case. And the evidence - an offensively large piece of it - speaks for itself.

800 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands and between the Pacific coasts of North America and Asia floats the North Pacific gyre, also pessimistically known as the Great Garbage Patch.  This collection of debris is living proof that human waste is suffocating the planet. Now estimated to be larger than of the state of Texas and growing rapidly, the Garbage Patch is a plastic landfill in the middle of the Pacific. Hemmed in by currents, this stagnant ten-million-square-mile area is a graveyard of discards that includes everything from milk jugs to tires, diapers and ghost nets, trash bags and tarps, abandoned toys and ropes. Most of the trash in the Garbage Patch is plastics: It is estimated that more than 46,000 pieces of plastic litter float on each square mile.

Pollution is one of the most destructive environmental disasters. Every year, plastic waste chokes to death about 100,000 whales, manatees, dolphins, seals, an unknown number of sea turtles, and around 2 million birds. One seabird dissected by Dutch researchers held 1,603 plastic pieces in its digestive system. Scientists also estimate that 70 percent of the plastic in the ocean will eventually sink to the seafloor. The consequences of these sinking landfills are still unknown to scientists and ecologists.

Captain Charles Moore is a world-known sailor, marine scientist, and the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, California. Moore is credited with publicizing the Garbage Patch since he discovered the site on a cross-ocean trip in 1997. Captain Moore has travelled to the Gyre every year to research the environmental implications of the pollution. He has noted that on each return voyage, the amount of trash has only grown.


Captain Moore pulling plastic debris from the Gyre (Photo: Algalita)

Cleaning up the crap in our oceans is a significant part of Tenthmil’s restoration campaign. So Tenthmil contacted Captain Moore before he left on his excursions to the Gyre this past summer. We were able to coordinate a date to meet him and his research assistant at the actual location of the North Pacific Gyre with the aid of Billabong, which generously offered the use of their Honolulu-based amphibious seaplane.

TENTHMIL will be reporting extensively over the next year about our mission to the Gyre, and our work with other groups helping to clean up this mess.

 

This was To The Gyre, an entry in our Restoration Campaign from January 21, 2010. It was filed under Oceans and Gyre Cleanup.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Have a tip for TENTHMIL.com? Let us know!

Name:

Email:

Are you human?

Related Restoration Entries

See more recent entries in Restoration

Active Discussions in Restoration

  1. Lee Ann Thompson commented on The Rivers Agreement
  2. Peter Maier commented on Rivers: America's Toxic Veins
  3. Lee Ann Thompson commented on INTERVIEW FROM A TREETOP: Treesitter Eric Blevins Talks to TENTHMIL from Coal River Mountain
  4. Captain CrazyBeard (aka Jungle Chemist) commented on Treesitters Come Down Off Coal River Mountain
  5. Lee Ann Thompson commented on War of the Waters 2: The California Front