Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Promise,” she said. “Promise you'll hang on with your last fingernail.”
Conversations about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch tend to follow a certain profile. First
there is the flash of recognition, embedded with a nugget of misinformation:
Right! The giant plastic island! The one the size of Texas!
It's not an island, you say.
Well, right,
they say, moderating.
It's more of a pile.
You narrow your eyes. Seriously, how do you
pile
anything on the ocean?
Eventually, with coaxing, they let go of the island imagery, of impractical notions of
how things pile, of Texas. Sobriety achieved, there comes the inevitable question:
Can it be cleaned up?
A lot of people have considered this question, and have debated it, and have pondered
different strategies and possibilities. From this, a broad consensus has emerged among sci-
entists and environmentalists, which I'm happy to summarize:
Get real.
We're talking about the ocean here. Even assuming that we could just get a big
net—whoever
we
is—and that it would be worth the massive use of fuel to drag it back and
forth for thousands of miles across the Gyre, and that there would be an exit strategy for
what to do with a hemisphere-size net full of trash…even granted all these impossibilities,
there remains the intractable fact of the confetti.
As a plastic object spends year after year in the water, it becomes brittle from the sun.
The waves begin to break it into pieces, and gradually it is delivered into smaller and smal-
ler bits, a plastic confetti that might be the most troublesome thing about the Garbage Patch.
Nets and larger objects may strangle marine life, and bottle caps and disposable cutlery
may fill the stomachs of baby albatross, but the confetti has a chance of interacting with
the ecosystem at a more fundamental level. Since it is consumed just as food would be,
it has the potential to introduce toxins at the bottom of the food chain, toxins that may be
concentrated by their passage up the chain to large animals like tuna and humans. In 2009,
researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (on a voyage funded in part by
Project Kaisei) found plastic in the stomachs of nearly a tenth of all the fish they sampled
in the Garbage Patch, and they estimated that tens of thousands of tons of plastic are con-
sumed by fish there every year.
