Posted by: gukurup | April 9, 2008
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Also Know As The Trash Vortex
Sad Picture: No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words: litter.
Sadly - many people take the “out of sight, out of mind” approach.
Plastic contamination in the world’s oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up.
We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic. All succeeding generations will only see an ocean filled with trash.
Net a piece of plastic, and you’ll find barnacles and small crabs clinging to it. Not a good thing for fish, birds, and mammals that mistake it for its natural food, such as eggs, jellyfish, or other sea creatures.
Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves.
| The carcass of an albatross on the beach; birds and sea mammals mistake plastics for food then inevitably starve to death. This is the bird’s actual gut sample. |
| the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or “trash vortex” - essentially a floating expanse of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean now covering an area twice the size of the continental U.S. Believed to hold almost 100m tons of flotsam, this vast “plastic soup” stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan |
| “trash vortex” aren’t just limited to the marine ecosystem |
| “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple.” |
| It’s everywhere. Multiple paths of Ziploc baggies, bottle caps, balloons, pretzel bags, and other debris lead you to the swirling trash vortex like a trail of bread crumbs |
| In the most polluted areas, the plastic-to-plankton ratio is 48 to 1. It’s become part of the oceanic landscape |
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