The
Pacific ocean is home to hundreds of thousands of marine animals.
Unfortunately, it is also home to a great deal of garbage. Out of the
approximately two hundred billion pounds of trash produced annually
around the world, about twenty billion pounds of that ends up in the
ocean. A lot of that ocean trash eventually sinks and damages wildlife
on the seafloor, and the rest stays afloat, usually becoming part of an
ocean current, otherwise known as a gyre. This is how most of the
garbage has become in the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.
The
Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is an enormous section of the North Pacific
Gyre that floats with garbage, mostly plastics. The garbage is spread
all along the gyre, not just clumped up into one huge island of garbage.
The gyre is a big current, and it is always moving each piece of trash
around to a new part of the Pacific Ocean.
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| What Moore may have seen on his way across the Atlantic |
The
garbage patch was discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles J. Moore on his
way back to his home from a sailboat race. He saw that the water was
filled with floating plastics and other pieces of trash such as fishing
nets, bottle caps, coat hangers, tires, and even some chemical drums.
This really made an impact on how Moore saw the ocean. He became
invested in the problem, he did everything he could to try to stop the
problem.
It
took many decades for the trash to build up that much in the Pacific.
There were little to no laws about dumping trash in the ocean in the
early 1900’s. Most of the trash that is floating out in the Pacific
Ocean now is from before 1990. The dumping of trash in the ocean
obviously had a huge impact on the Pacific’s ecosystem. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2008, each person in the U.S.
produced around 4.5 pounds of trash every day. At the time, there were
about 300 million people living in the U.S.. That means that in total,
the U.S. alone produced around 1.35 billion pounds of trash every day.
Imagine one fourth of that trash going into the ocean. If all of the
garbage in the North Pacific Gyre was wound up into one big clump, it
would be a floating island of garbage twice the size of Texas. That
gives a perspective of just how big the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is.
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| A bird that ate many pieces of plastic and died |
All of the garbage in the Pacific is affecting many ecosystems. There
are so many pieces of garbage in the pacific, that it outnumbers
phytoplankton 6 to 1. The trash in the gyre can be mistaken for all
sorts of food. If an animal mistakes a piece of garbage for food and
consumes it, it will most likely not be able to digest the trash and
die.
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| Sea turtle that swam into an abandoned net |
The trash can also kill animals without it being consumed. Marine
animals could get caught in stranded nets, garbage bags, grocery bags,
etc,. The floating garbage can kill algae and other photosynthesizing
plants and animals because it can block the sunlight from the surface.
This can not only kill those plants and animals, but it can alter an
entire ecosystem. These are all huge dangers for any marine animal
living in the Pacific.
