Trash In The Ocean The Size Of Texas? Meet The Pacific Garbage Patch

It's no secret that the world's oceans are in trouble.

Trash and plastic pollution has reached epidemic levels, and it seems like every day, there is a news story about marine life being harmed by our carelessness.

What you may not know is that there is a floating island of trash in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas, and it is named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

This massive garbage patch is made up of all sorts of plastic debris, from bottles and bags to styrofoam cups and abandoned fishing nets. It's heartbreaking to think about how much damage we've done to our planet, but luckily some people are working to clean it up.

Meaning And Examples Of Plastic Pollution

A new study has shown that there is a trash island in the Pacific Ocean that is the size of Texas!

This Trash Island, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is made up of plastic and other debris that has been floating on the ocean surface for years.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch sits midway between Hawaii and California and is one of the world's five offshore plastic accumulation zones. It has a sea surface area of around 617763.4 sq mi (1.6 million sq km), which is almost twice the size of Texas and times the size of France.

Each year, between 1-2.1 million t (1.15 million-2.41 million mt) of plastic is projected to enter the ocean via rivers.

More than half of this plastic is less dense than water; it will float once it reaches the sea. In the maritime environment, the tougher, more buoyant plastics exhibit durability, allowing them to be transported over long distances.

They stay at the surface waters as they go offshore, being carried by converging currents and eventually aggregating in the patch.

Once these plastics reach the patch's massive vortex, they are unlikely to exist until the sun, waves, and marine life break them down into tiny microplastics. Microplastic concentrations in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are expected to rise as more pieces of plastic are thrown into the ecosystem.

As a memorial to his father, Lecomte crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1998 to raise money for cancer research.

The 51-year-old French-born long-distance swimmer completed the extensive swim in 73 days despite being chased by a shark for five days, getting stung by jellyfish, and being completely tired. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, on the other hand, is merely a section of the northern Pacific vortex.

Another subtropical convergence zone accumulation is to the northwest, while the Western Garbage Patch is due west, closer to Japan's shore.

Lecomte tried a 5,500-mi (8851.3 km) swim from Tokyo to San Francisco in 2017.

Using a GPS monitoring device, he was accompanied by a support team. He executed a 'staged swim' (resuming at the exact place where he exited after a day of swimming), which allowed him to pinpoint the distance traversed precisely.

The mainsail of Lecomte's support boat, on the other hand, was frequently damaged by strong gusts.

The team constantly had to make repairs, so Lecomte decided to call off the endeavor after around 1056.3 mi (1700 km).

Each day, Lecomte's boat crew gathered samples for a variety of scientific organizations in order to add to data on ocean plastic pollution.

This included placing trackers on large pieces of debris to track their movement on ocean currents; observing marine life – from microbes to large pelagic animals – as they communicate with the marine debris; and sifting for microfiber samples to gain knowledge more about this type of pollution that is invisible to the naked eye but has the potential to harm human and environmental health.

The support vessel could collect samples that would normally be out of reach for scientists on routine ocean journeys as it set sail at the speed of a swimmer.

Effects Of Plastic Pollution In The Ocean

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating island of trash that has been accumulating in the Pacific Ocean for decades. It's made up of everything from plastic bottles and bags to styrofoam packaging and abandoned fishing nets.

And it's not just an eyesore - this Trash Island is having a devastating effect on marine life. Millions of marine animals are killed by ingesting or getting tangled in plastic pollution every year.

This includes everything from turtles and seabirds to dolphins and whales. It's estimated that there are now more pieces of plastic in the ocean than there are stars in the Milky Way!

According to a study conducted in partnership with Deloitte, the annual economic consequences of marine plastic are projected to be between $6-19 billion. The costs are incurred due to the impact on tourism, fisheries, aquaculture, and (government) cleanups.

These prices do not include the impact on human health and marine ecology (due to insufficient research available). As a result, intercepting plastic in rivers is far more cost-effective than dealing with the downstream impacts.

Given that a garbage truck's worth of plastic enters the ocean every minute and never entirely vanishes, separating reality from myth when discussing marine litter is more important than ever.

The plastics will most likely break down into smaller plastics while floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch because they have been found to persist in this region.

Sun exposure, waves, marine life, and temperature variations are the most common causes of the degradation of plastic samples into microplastics. Microplastics have been found floating in the water surface layers, as well as in the water column and even on the ocean floor.

Microplastics are extremely difficult to remove once they reach this size, and marine animals frequently mistake them for food.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating landfill in the ocean, entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic called microplastics.

When floating at or near the water surface, only 1% of marine plastics are discovered. Each square mile of the seafloor now contains an estimated 154 lb (70 kg) of plastic.

Individual plastic particles are also smaller than one may think. While some of the plastic ocean debris is huge and visible, such as plastic bottles, toys, and toothbrushes, the majority of it is microplastics, with plenty of open water in between.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes on its website, 'Because microplastics are tinier than a pencil eraser, they are not immediately detectable to the naked eye.'

'It's like pepper flakes swirling in a soup, rather than something you can skim off the top.' These little particles of broken-down plastic waste are everywhere, and marine animals mistake them for food.

Ocean cleanup is not a viable solution due to the complex forces of nature at work and the small size of microplastics. According to NOAA, to clean up less than 1% of the North Pacific Ocean would take 67 ships and a whole year.

Furthermore, present technologies may kill marine life by sucking them up together with the trash they are attempting to collect. Another concern is that the ocean cleanup team does not address the root of the problem.

After the ocean cleanup foundation has gathered the plastic debris, what happens to it? It certainly does not vanish. Recycling will not fix the problem.

Only 9% of all plastic debris generated has ever been recycled. Oceana's initiatives encourage businesses to offer plastic-free alternatives and governments to implement legislation prohibiting the use of single-use plastics.

The answer to cleaning up our oceans once and for all will be proactive rather than reactive solutions. Before it's too late, we must dispel the falsehoods and save our oceans from the plastic pollution disaster.

Effect Of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch On Marine Life

The most obvious issue is the detrimental impact of plastic samples build-up generated by the previously outlined convergence zones. At least 267 species are affected by this pollution around the world, including sea turtles (86 %), seabirds (44 %), and marine mammal species (43 %) (Laist 1997).

Young and others focused their efforts in 2009 on an area southeast of the Kuroshio Extension in Japan. They discovered a Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) population, noting that the feeding region of adult albatross from Kure Atoll overlapped with the Western Garbage Patch's distribution.

They realized that this is what caused the transfer of marine plastics from adults to their young albatross.

In fact, despite having a similar amount of available natural food, the albatross chicks from Kure Atoll were given approximately 10 times the amount of plastic as the Oahu albatross sample.

While Young et al. were unable to determine the level of death caused by plastic ingestion, they did see mechanical blockage of the digestive tract, decreased food consumption, hunger satiation, and possible exposure to hazardous chemicals.

In addition to swallowing pollution, marine creatures are also threatened by entanglement and a phenomenon known as 'ghost fishing.' This happens when fishing gear is lost or abandoned, yet the fishing gear continues to 'fish' and depletes the available resources.

Some makers hope to chemically change ocean plastics if they end out in the water to prevent entanglement, typically caused by nets and six-pack soda rings, among other contaminants.

Chemical modifications in the polymer may allow it to absorb UV-B radiation from the sun, resulting in a smaller, less dangerous product. However, the resulting polymer isn't much more biodegradable (Moore 2008).

Concerns are developing as the amount of plastic in the marine environment increases. With other environmental issues, such as climate change, it will be vital to start (and continue) studying and understanding how rising atmospheric and sea temperatures will alter ocean circulation, wind, and debris movement patterns.

If significant changes occur in the North Pacific region of the Pacific Ocean, particularly in the area covered by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the consequent marine pollution collection and retention might be significant.