In a three-year study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports March 22, 2018, the floating mass of garbage in what is called the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (GPGP) is “increasing exponentially.”
The study was led by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and researchers at institutions in New Zealand, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Denmark. Using 30 vessels and a C-130 Hercules airplane, the team collected and cataloged over one million pieces of plastic, mostly microplastics, (0.5 centimeters in diameter) on up to recognizable items like bottles.
The study suggests that the amount of plastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch totals over 1.8 trillion pieces, a number that far exceeds earlier estimates, reports CBC Canada.
Laurent Lebreton, the lead author of the study said the team found that almost half of the 80,000 metric tons of garbage floating in the GPGP consisted of “ghost nets,” or discarded fishing nets, while about 20 percent of the trash is debris from the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan.
The Trash Isles
According to CNN, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was first discovered in 1997 by oceanographer Charles Moore when he sailed home to Southern California after finishing the Transpacific Yacht Race, from California to Hawaii.
“I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” wrote Moore about his discovery in Natural History. “In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”
The GPGP is so big that last year, environmentalists asked the United Nations to declare the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a country, called “The Trash Isles,” complete with its own passport and currency, called debris. The group even had a list of 200,000 people who wanted to be citizens of the new country.
The first person to sign up for citizenship was former US vice president and environmentalist Al Gore. The list also included celebrities Sir David Attenborough, Chris Hemsworth, and Gal Gadot.
How was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch formed?
Annual global consumption of plastics has reached 320 million tons, with the majority of the plastics being discarded into landfills or littering the environment, including the oceans.
Nearly two-thirds of plastic produced is less dense than seawater. When it gets into the marine environment, this buoyant plastic can be transported by surface currents and winds, recaptured by coastlines, degraded into smaller pieces by the action of the sun, temperature variations, waves and marine life, or lose buoyancy and sink, says the study.
However, a portion of this debris gets transported offshore and enters oceanic gyres. A gyre is any large system of circulating ocean currents, particularly those involved with large wind movements, and ocean gyres are known to collect plastic pollutants.
A considerable accumulation zone for buoyant plastic was identified in the eastern part of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This area has been described as “a gyre within a gyre” and has been given the name, Great Pacific Garbage Patch.