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Our ocean back yard: Ocean currents carry our waste

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 29, 2008 at 7:37 am

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Ocean currents carry many things, including those which we choose to toss away. One result is a vast expanse of garbage, caught in gentle waters inside the rotations of ocean currents west of our shores.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the North Pacific Gyre, one of several zones worldwide surrounded by swirling waters driven by weather and the earth’s rotation. Between North America and Japan, the gyre is a 10 million square mile oval where most boaters — some call it the doldrums — won’t go. It’s believed to be a relatively barren area where high-pressure air keeps the slow, deep waters still, with fewer of the bigger fish that need prey more easily found in active waters.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has two parts. The eastern one is north of Hawaii, from 500 nautical miles west of California extending eastward, covering an area twice the size of Texas. The western portion is northwest of Hawaii stretching towards Japan. A thin 6,000-mile current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone — also rich in waste — connects the two. The plastic floating there has decades to last — estimates are that up to 80 percent comes from land. An animation from Greenpeace demonstrating movement of flotsam through the patch over time can be viewed at http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/the-expedition/news/trashing-our-oceans/ocean_pollution_animation.

There may be 100 million tons of materials in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to Algalita Marine Research Foundation founder Capt. Charles Moore. Sailing home to California from a yacht race in Hawaii in 1997, he veered off course through the gyre, finding himself in a large expanse of debris. “I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic,” he says.

Read the rest of this article from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.

You can make a difference this week by helping with pollution prevention and cleanup efforts. Click here to visit the Clean Beaches Coalition and schedule your involvement. To find out more about the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, click here.

June 29, 2008 · Filed Under Pacific Ocean Garbage Dump

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