The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Are you reliable when it comes to putting your trash in the garbage

bin? What if I told you that out in the Pacific Ocean there exists a garbage landfill bigger than the state Texas? Thats right; there is an area of garbage that expands to cover an area greater than the second largest state in the United States of America. (For all of you who need a geography refresher, Alaska is first) This landfill is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in one of the earths 5 major gyres, the North Pacific Gyre. An ocean gyre is a circular ocean current formed by the earths wind patterns and forces created by the rotation of the planet. Think of the East Australian Current in Finding Nemo, but only circular. The circular motion of the North Pacific Gyre draws in debris that becomes trapped in the center of the current. It eventually starts to accumulate up and thus an ocean garbage patch is formed. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually broken up into 2 sections of the North Pacific Gyre: the Eastern and Western patches. The Western patch is in between Japan and Hawaii while the Eastern patch is in between Hawaii and California. The amount of debris in this garbage patch accumulates because it is largely made up of plastics, which are not biodegradable. The microbes that usually can break down other substances are not able to recognize plastic as food, so the plastic is then left to float there forever. Sunlight does its part to try to get rid of the plastic by photodegrading the bond in the plastic polymers, but this just reduces the plastic in to smaller and smaller pieces (Moore 2008). The plastic is still there; it just becomes microscopic and usually is eaten by organisms of the sea.
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When people first hear about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch most imagine a bunch of floating trash on top of the water, but a lot of it is the broken down plastics that arent visible from above. A lot of this plastic can also eventually sink, which damages the ocean floor, while the rest remains floating or suspended in the water column.

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So where does all this garbage come from? About 80 percent comes from land via powerful ocean currents, while the rest comes from offshore oil rigs, commercial fishing, and cargo ships. It can take years for pieces of garbage from land to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it will eventually add to the problem. Plastic can be washed from the interiors of continents to the sea via sewers, streams and rivers, or it might simply wash away from the coast. You can imagine how harmful all this garbage is to the marine life. The garbage is commonly mistaken for food while other aquatic life becomes strangled in the plastic rings used to hold six-packs of soda together. (Betts, 2008; Thompson et al., 2009a) By dissecting beached marine animals, or by initiating regurgitation in some seabirds, their gut contents can be examined for the presence of plastics, which can then be recognized and recorded (van Franeker, 2010). With commercial http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/chris-jordan-takes-shots-atfisherman now turning to plastic nets instead of rope the-trash-patch.html nets because of their low cost and high durability, this creates an even bigger risk of nets being lost at sea and more plastic contaminating the waters. These nets can also tangle up sea creatures in an event described as ghost fishing (Lozano and Mouat, 2009). Sea turtles, whales, and dolphins are all common creatures found tangled in the nets. Because the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so far from any countrys coastline, no nation will take responsibility or provide the funding to clean it up, but there are many international organizations that are dedicated to preventing the patch from growing any further. Cleaning up marine debris would not as easy as scooping up garbage. Many pieces of debris are the same size as small sea animals, so nets designed to scoop up trash would catch these creatures as well. Even if we could design nets that would just catch garbage, the size of the oceans makes this job very time-consuming. The trash on the ocean floor would also be very difficult to get to. Recently a similar garbage patch that contains the accumulation of plastic particles, weathered fishing line, Styrofoam, wrappers, and raw resin pellets has shown up in the North Atlantic Ocean. It seems as though patches like these are going to keep popping up unless we do something about it. As for what you can do to help stop the garbage patch from growing, start with simply getting your garbage into the trash can. These garbage patches are only going to get larger, so every bit of effort to recycle and clean up is necessary until a plan of action is decided upon to clean up these water landfills.

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Literature Cited

Betts, K. (2008) Why small plastic particles may pose a big problem in the oceans. Environmental Science & Technology. Charles James, M. (2008) Synthetic polymers in the marine environment: A rapidly increasing, long-term threat. Environmental Research 108. Cole, M., Lindeque, P., Halsband, C. and Galloway, T. (2011) Microplastics as contaminants in the marine environment: a review. Marine pollution bulletin 62(12), 2588-2597. Thompson, R., Swan, S., Moore, C. and vom Saal, F. (2009) Our plastic age. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 364(1526), 1973-1976. van Franeker, J., Blaize, C., Danielsen, J., Fairclough, K., Gollan, J., Guse, N., Hansen, P.-L., Heubeck, M., Jensen, J.-K., Le Guillou, G., Olsen, B., Olsen, K.-O., Pedersen, J., Stienen, E. and Turner, D. (2011) Monitoring plastic ingestion by the northern fulmar Fulmarus glacialis in the North Sea. Environmental pollution (Barking, Essex : 1987) 159(10), 2609-2615.