The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The oceans are, generally, a mess between acidification, overheating, and pollution. But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is uniquely its own nightmare. Slowly rotating ocean gyres spanning thousands of miles have become magnets for human’s growing legacy of plastic, but the one in the North Pacific has achieved a degree of notoriety beyond its counterparts in other ocean basins. Spanning an area of nearly 618,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers), the patch of ocean contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash. Ghost fishing gear has ensnared marine life, sea turtles have choked themselves to death on plastic, and the islands that dot the region are awash in plastic with tragic results, as the photo above illustrates.
Efforts to clean the region up have garnered a degree of praise and concern, largely because while it’s very altruistic to scoop up plastic, it fails to address the underlying problem: More trash is piling up than we can remove.
