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| You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If you haven’t already, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a huge eddy of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Plastic Island In The Ocean Facts
Scientists studying the ocean’s trash have discovered it contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic — 16 times previous estimates. At about 620,000 square miles, the trash island covers an area twice the size of Texas.
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Although often referred to as a patch or island, the trash is actually spread out like a plastic soup rather than a visible pile of trash.
Laurent Lebreton, a researcher at The Ocean Cleanup, and his colleagues quantified the amount of debris in a study published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. They discovered that the patch not only contains much more plastic than previously thought, but that more and more microplastics are accumulating in it.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a vast mass of stubborn ocean plastic, chemical sludge and other debris. The buoyant, hard-to-decompose trash gets trapped in the currents of a huge ocean eddy – in this case, the North Pacific Rim – over decades. This spot floats in subtropical waters between California and Hawaii.
The team used aerial photographs as well as data from 652 fishing nets to get a more accurate picture of the garbage than previously described. They found that 99.9 percent of the debris was made up of plastics: 46 percent was fishing nets, and more than 75 percent of the plastic pieces were longer than 5 cm.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The researchers identified some pieces of plastic: containers, lids, ropes and bottles. Even production dates from the 1970s to the present decade have been spotted. One from 1977, 7 from the 1980s, 17 from the 1990s, 24 from the 2000s and 1 from 2010.
Microplastics 0.02 to 0.2 inches in size accounted for 8 percent of all plastic. That might not seem like much, but it’s equivalent to 94 percent of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the patch. They discovered that the amount of microplastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has increased dramatically since the 1970s.
“We knew that most of it was made up of microplastics, but if you look at the total mass of plastic available, most of it is in large debris that breaks down into harmful microplastics over time,” Lebreton told Gizmodo.
This could be bad news for marine life. Fish eventually eat the dirty microplastics, and they can move up the food chain, Lebreton said.
What Is The Great Pacific Garbage Island?
. “A small fish eats the dirty plastic, the big fish eats the small fish, and the pollutants go up the food chain,” he explained.
The increase in plastic pieces, large and small, likely contributed to the team’s results. According to the authors, the increase in plastic pollution in the oceans may be behind the results, especially after the 2011 Tohoku tsunami.
The authors say more research is needed to determine exactly where this much plastic trash comes from and how long it can stay in the vortex.
Lebreton says changing plastic usage habits can help stop the patch from growing. “Stopping single-use plastics is a good start,” he said. “Reduce, reuse, recycle!”
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I kept thinking it might have been my photo on TV. I prayed day and night for the safe return of the crew.
A lower court has been asked to review a case involving bakers who refused to serve LGBTQ+ customers. Marine debris is a common pollution problem in oceans and waterways around the world. Plastic debris is one of the most serious threats to the health of the oceans.
90% of the trash floating in the ocean and littering our shores is plastic. Plastics can harm wildlife, damage coastal habitats, impact local economies, and even threaten human health.
Even if you don’t live near the coast, plastic waste can still end up in the ocean. A plastic water bottle blown onto the street can enter storm water drains, rivers and streams, and end up in the ocean.
Heartbreaking Facts About The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Plastic waste comes in many types and sizes that we buy and use ourselves, including disposable water bottles, plastic grocery bags, fishing nets, fishing line, plastic cups and lids, packaging, balloons and straws. In the marine environment, this type of debris can harm wildlife when animals mistake plastic for food, or accidentally become entangled in plastic littering our coastlines or floating in the ocean.
Plastic does not biodegrade. Instead, once in the environment, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces the longer it is exposed to the sun; a process called photodegradation. Plastic particles with a diameter of less than 5 mm are classified as microplastics. Although small, these pieces of plastic can have a huge impact on the health of the oceans.
Some microplastics start small and end up in the ocean. Microbeads have been used in products such as facial scrubs and exfoliants; however, microbeads were phased out under national law in 2015.
Even clothes shed microplastics. These “microfibers” come from washing polyester, rayon, and other synthetic fabrics. According to a recent study, microfibers made up 97% of all microplastics found in the beach sands of national parks. Although wastewater treatment plants filter out most of the microfibers, some microfibers still pass through their systems and end up in our waterways and oceans.
How Ocean Currents Create Trash Islands And Impact Wildlife
Plastic poses a serious threat to our oceans and waterways. Birds, turtles, fish and other marine life ingest the pieces of plastic, mistaking them for fish, plankton, jellyfish or other food sources. Hundreds of thousands of marine life, both large and small, die each year from complications related to plastic debris – they may end up with stomachs full of plastic they can’t digest or become fatally entangled in the debris.
Harmful chemical pollutants can also adhere to plastics and increase the toxicity of plastic debris ingested by animals. An assessment of the risk to human health of microplastics in seafood is currently underway.
Even though the dangers of plastic may seem overwhelming, individual actions can make a big difference! Be part of the solution! Here’s how: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific. Marine debris is trash that ends up in the ocean, seas, and other large bodies of water.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is trash that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large bodies of water.
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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Garbage Patch, stretches from the west coast of North America to Japan. The patch is actually made up of the Western Garbage Patch near Japan and the Eastern Garbage Patch between the US states of Hawaii and California.
These rotating debris fields are connected by the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone a few hundred kilometers north of Hawaii. In this convergence zone, warm water from the South Pacific meets colder water from the Arctic. The zone acts as a highway that transports debris from one patch to another.
The entire Great Pacific Garbage Patch is bounded by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defines a gyre as a large system of eddying ocean currents. Increasingly, however, it also refers to the garbage patch as a vortex of plastic waste and debris breaking down into tiny particles in the ocean. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre consists of four clockwise currents around 20 million square kilometers (7.7 million square miles): the California Current, the North Equatorial Current, the Kuroshio Current, and the North Pacific Current .
The area in the middle of the ring road is usually very calm and stable. The circular motion of the gyre draws the debris into this stable center where it becomes trapped. A plastic water bottle discarded off the coast of California, for example, is carried south towards Mexico by the California Current. There you can catch the North Equatorial Current that crosses the vast Pacific Ocean. Near the coast of Japan, the bottle can move northward on the strong Kuroshiro Current. Finally, the bottle moves eastward in the North Pacific Current. The gently rolling eddies of the eastern and western garbage patches gradually draw in the bottle.
Where Does The Plastic In Our Oceans Come From?
The amount of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is accumulating because much of it is non-biodegradable. Many plastics, for example, do not wear out; they simply break into smaller and smaller pieces.
For many people, the thought of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of garbage floating in the ocean. In reality, these patches consist almost entirely of tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics are not always visible to the naked eye. Even satellite images do not show a huge garbage patch. The microplastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply turn the water into a murky soup. This soup is mixed with larger items such as fishing gear and shoes.
The sea floor beneath the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may also be an underwater garbage dump. Oceanographers and ecologists recently discovered that about 70 percent of marine debris actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
While oceanographers and climatologists predicted the
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