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Voyage to the Pacific Ocean’s ‘Garbage Patch’

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 19, 2009 at 7:05 am

From Scientific American:

Editor’s Note: Scuba instructor and underwater videographer Drew Wheeler is traveling on board the Algalita Marine Research Foundation’s 50-foot (15.2-meter) Ocean Research Vessel, Alguita, on a two-month voyage to sample and study portions of a 10-million-square-mile (25.9-million-square-kilometer) oval known as the North Subtropical Gyre (a.k.a. “Pacific Garbage Patch”). Wheeler and the rest of the Alguita crew left Long Beach, Calif., on June 10 with a plan to cross the International Date Line and investigate regions of reported high plastic concentrations, northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. This is his first blog post for ScientificAmerican.com.

June 17, 2009

Over 1,100 miles (1,770.3 kilometers) traveled.

Well, we are one week into our journey, and already Mother Nature has proved to be the boss. We expected to have a day or two of northwesterly winds. But we thought once we left shore behind, our catamaran would catch the prevailing northeast trade winds and take us to our objective—the international dateline, north of Hawaii.

Not so fast. We had five days straight of almost pure north wind that kept pushing us farther and farther south. At one point Alguita Captain Charles Moore made the famous call, “We can’t there from here.” So we then started discussing other objectives, finally settling on an area where some plankton are blooming, just northeast of the Hawaiian island chain.

There is a theory that the same current and weather patterns that lead to plankton clouds may also corral the plastics on the ocean surface, so we are going to see if this is the case. According to [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)] coastal watch scientist Dave Foley, there is a bloom occurring as we speak, and we are only a few days away, so we are going for it.

Read more from Scientific American by clicking here.

June 19, 2009 · Filed Under Pacific Ocean Garbage Dump

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