The Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch: Deadly and Disgusting

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.

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.

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. 

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.

    If nothing is done to help stop this massive garbage patch from growing, it could potentially kill off thousands of ecosystems in the pacific ocean. To help, many marine biologists are going on trips across the Pacific and picking up as many pieces of garbage as they possibly can. We can also help prevent the garbage patch from getting any bigger by recycling as much as possible. Recycling will not only keep the plastics from entering the ocean, but it will also help reduce waste, protect the environment, and increase material utility. Doing all of these things will help reduce the effects of the deadly Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.