Pacific garbage island

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

"Great Pacific Garbage Patch", "Pacific Trash Vortex", "North Pacific Gyre", "Pacific Garbage Island" which is growing at a gigantic pace. They have been talking about the garbage island for more than half a century, but practically no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage to the environment is caused, whole species of animals are dying out. Chances are high that the moment will come when nothing can be fixed.

Pollution dates back to the days when plastic was invented. On the one hand, it is an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It made it easier until the plastic product was thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island, the size of the US state of Texas, floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, daily ~ 2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris are dumped into the ocean from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific is responsible for the deaths of over a million seabirds each year, as well as over 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - all these objects are swallowed by birds, mistaking them for food.

" Garbage Island"It has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific Current System, the center of which, where all the garbage gets, is relatively stationary. Scientists estimate that the mass of the garbage island is now more than three and a half million tons, and the area - over a million square kilometers. "The island" has a number of unofficial names: "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", "Eastern Garbage Patch", "Pacific Trash Vortex", etc. In Russian, it is sometimes also called “trash iceberg.” In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island's zone by six times.

This huge pile of floating debris - in fact, the planet's greatest dump - is held in one place by the influence of underwater currents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California across the North Pacific Ocean past Hawaii and almost reaches distant Japan.

American oceanographer Charles Moore - the discoverer of this "great Pacific garbage patch", also known as the "garbage dump", believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Markus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA) founded by Moore, said yesterday: “Initially people assumed that this was an island of plastic debris that you could almost walk on. This representation is inaccurate. plastic soup. It's just endless - perhaps twice the size of the continental United States. " The story of the discovery of the trash spot by Moore is quite interesting:

14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical tycoon, decided to take a break in Hawaii after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had swum into the trash heap.

“During the week, whenever I went out on deck, some plastic junk floated by,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? - I could not believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge water area? I had to sail through this dump day after day, and there was no end in sight …"

Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and with the proceeds founded the environmental organization Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often dismissed and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would await the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped the ecologists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic waste onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say that the son of the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who went to shoot a new film in Hawaii, almost got a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic ruined not only the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, Moore's name has not left the pages of the American media. Last week, the AMRF founder warned that if consumers don't restrict the use of plastic that is not recyclable, the surface area of the trash soup will double in the next 10 years and threaten not only Hawaii, but all the Pacific Rim countries.

But in general, they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a "soup" - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to a hundred meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that gets here sinks into the bottom layers, so we don't even know exactly how much trash can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the "plastic sea" cannot be seen from the satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of the ship or by diving into the water. But sea vessels are not often in this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for the fact that there is never a wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Maelstrom is neutral waters, and all the trash that floats here is no one.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has monitored the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for over 15 years. He compares the cesspool with a living creature: "It moves around the planet like a large animal released from a leash." When this animal approaches land - and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago, this is the case - the results are quite dramatic. “As soon as a garbage spot burps, the whole beach is covered with this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, teeming with debris, poses a threat to human health as well. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic granules - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting like chemical sponges, attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs with food. "What goes into the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean dwellers, and then on your plate. It's very simple."

China and India are the main ocean pollutants. It is considered normal here to throw your trash directly into the nearby body of water. Below is a photo that makes no sense to comment..

There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical whirlpool formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade winds and inter-trade countercurrents. The North Pacific whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where for centuries the most diverse rubbish has been demolished from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, shipwrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of decaying mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, therefore the North Pacific whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, no mammals, or birds. None other than the zooplankton colonies. Therefore, fishing vessels do not enter here either, even military and merchant ships try to bypass this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the beginning of the 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organics, are poorly biodegradable and do not go anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, with a total weight of six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of all garbage spots exceeds even the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of this colossal dump is increasing by an order of magnitude.

A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. There used to be legends about the island of wreckage of ships and masts, which drifts in those waters, now wooden wreckage has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we meet the most real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced annually in the world and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing faster and faster every year.