What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
August 11, 2018
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches across a swath of the North Pacific Ocean, forming a nebulous, floating junk yard on the high seas. It’s the poster child for a worldwide problem: plastic that begins in human hands yet ends up in the ocean, often inside animals’ stomachs or around their necks. The best way of visualizing The great Pacific Garbage Patch is to imagine a big soup floating in the ocean like oil does. Areas that contain the largest numbers of plastic are the ocean gyres. These are large systems of moving ocean currents. In a systematic drawing you would see that the water is circulating like a vortex. All garbage automatically goes to the middle and stays floating there.
Here are the basic facts about the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch;
- 7 million tons of weight
- Twice the size of Texas
- Up to 9 feet deep
- In the Great Pacific Ocean Gyre there is 6 times more plastic than plankton, which the main food for many ocean animals
- By estimation 80% of the plastic originates from land; floating in rivers to the ocean or blew by the wind into the ocean
- The remaining 20% of the plastic originates from oil platforms and ships
- According scientist it is the largest plastic dump on earth; so plastic patches are larger than waste dumps on land
- Trash patches consist for 80 percent out of plastic
- Scientific research from the Scrips Institution of Oceanography in California U.S. shows that 5 to 10% of the fish contain small pieces of plastic.
There is hope! See how you can help at https://www.theoceancleanup.com/
Placencia, Belize
