| The North Pacific Gyre's 'Plastic Island' |
| Experts Say A Mass of Plastic Trash in the North Pacific Gyre is Threatening the Environment |
| By Amanda Martinez |
| Updated April 11, 2008 |
One sunny day 10 years ago, Captain Charles Moore was sailing home from a yacht race in Hawaii when he steered his boat off-course in search of a little adventure in the North Pacific. Heading north in his 50-foot catamaran, Alguita, Moore wanted to graze the lower Eastern corner of a rarely sailed region, the North Pacific subtropical gyre, before making his way home to Long Beach, California.
ALGALITAA sample from a one-mile North Pacific Gyre trawl.The most remarkable characteristic of the gyre, a 10-million-square-foot, clockwise-churning vortex of four converging ocean currents, was supposed to be its unique weather pattern. It's a high-pressure area, meaning that warm air hovers over it. The air is still. There's no wind. Picture an immense oceanic desert. Frustrated sailors long ago christened the area "the doldrums" and avoided it, as do predatory fish who find no prey within its calm, nutrient-lean depths. "It almost looks like an oil slick, or like a mirror. It's really beautiful, the phenomena of a very smooth ocean," says researcher Dr. Marcus Eriksen.
But as Moore ventured into the gyre, his fascination with weather patterns gave way to a different reaction – alarm. In this most remote part of the ocean, his expectation of the pristine was met by blight. A vast array of trash – bottle caps, plastic bottles, fishing floats, wrappers, plastic bags and fragments, many tiny plastic fragments – stretched before Moore as far as the eye could see. His alarm turned to shock. It took him a week to sail through the gyre, the debris surrounding his boat the entire time.
Dr. Marcus Eriksen considers his first encounter with the gyre to have occurred on the beach in 2001 while teaching bird biology to high school students. This particular beach belonged to Midway Atoll, the last island of the Hawaiian Archipelago. "I noticed the hundreds of carcasses of Laysan albatrosses," says Eriksen. "Every single one had a handful of plastic inside its rib cage."
He quickly made the connection between the plastic pieces and their stark resemblance in ocean waters to the fish, squid and krill that serve as staples of the foraging albatross' diet. "I knew there was this floating plastic that these birds were consuming," he says. "That got me interested in the issue."
Four years later, Eriksen became director of research and education for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), the nonprofit that Moore founded after discovering the gyre. Together, Moore, whose résumé reads like a coming-of-age at sea story – deck hand, stock tender, able seaman and now captain – and Eriksen, a Marine who served in the first Gulf War, have made several trips back to the gyre to research the content and extent of its massive pollution and monitor its growth. When not at sea, the two men are working tirelessly to educate the public as to its existence and causes.
THE 'PLASTIC ISLAND'
By now, you may have heard reports of the enormous "trash patch" forming in the North Pacific gyre, as major news outlets have a two-minute, sound-bite love affair with the gyre's pervasive description. "It's twice the size of Texas," they say. "It's an incredible, floating, plastic island in the middle of the ocean."
"Twice the size of Texas is inaccurate. I wouldn't use that anymore," says Eriksen, who returned on Feb. 28 from AMRF's latest 4,000-mile research mission, during which he spent a solid four weeks in the gyre, running experiments. "If you want to give folks an idea of the extent of pollution in this gyre, I'd say twice the size of the continental United States is the best way to put it."
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