The North Pacific Trash Gyre
My nine-year-old freaked out yesterday when he read an email a local artist sent out about The North Pacific Trash Gyre, also known as Plastic Soup and The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, two huge masses in the Pacific Ocean made up of floating plastic. This plastic debris ranges from nurdles (factory-ready plastic the size of grains of sand that later becomes windborne) to tires, plastic bags and bottles, fishnets, etc. Thinner areas of the “Gyre” are 3-6 feet deep, while the thickest areas can reach 60 feet deep. Can you imagine 60 feet deep of plastic bits swirling around in the ocean? Too small to photograph, especially underwater (and frequently transparent), this is nevertheless a huge and disturbing problem. In the salt water, the plastic attracts oil-based carcinogens and other toxic chemicals, and fish lay their eggs in the Gyre as they do in seaweed and other floating debris. Other fish eat the eggs and the plastic they’re resting upon, and become contaminated; this contamination moves up to the top of the food chain and eventually you and I eat it. Birds also eat the fish eggs and ingest the plastic, and eventually die from rupturing organs especially when they eat things like toothbrushes and syringes.