Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On land, the Garbage Patch was often linked with plastic shopping bags. But here we saw
no plastic bags. Were they below the surface? Had they broken up into small fragments?
Were they all in the Western Garbage Patch, toward Japan? Or was it simply a myth that
plastic bags make it out to the Gyre?
What about the stuff we
were
seeing? Where was it from? For most objects, it seemed
impossible to tell. But there were more items with Chinese or Japanese words on them than
with English, and a few with Russian, too. Anecdotally, this reinforced the idea that the
Eastern Garbage Patch might be composed disproportionately of refuse from the
western
rim of the Pacific. Perhaps the Western Garbage Patch, the evil twin of the one we had now
entered, was home base to material from the coast of the United States and Canada. If only
we could have sailed another three thousand miles, I might have found all those Capri Sun
pouches I went through in sixth grade.
It was also difficult to make even casual judgments about whether the trash we were
seeing had come from land or from sea-borne sources. The common wisdom is that three-
quarters of ocean plastic comes from consumer sources on land. This is borne out in places
like Hawaii's Kamilo Beach, which catches the southwest edge of the Garbage Patch, and
where lighters and toothbrushes and combs dominate. But for much of what we saw on the
Kaisei,
provenance was hard to determine.
And what factors determined what we could see? How, for instance, did an object's
density and shape affect whether it stayed on the surface and how it traveled through the
Gyre? And how old were the objects we saw? And how toxic? And what proportion was
large objects versus confetti? And was there a class of sub-confetti particles, an as-yet-
unknown kingdom of microscopic polyethylene flora? And most important, what kind of
change did this wreak on the ecosystem?
Little of this is yet known to science—and to my nerd mind, it was the chance to help
answer even one of those questions that should have been our white whale. It was a whale
that swam alongside us for the entire voyage, but that we never noticed. And so the
Kaisei
sailed the ocean blue, irony on the wind, a mission to raise awareness, but not knowledge.
The Pirate King was a licensed ham-radio operator. Of course he was. He could have built
a ham radio from an old soda can and a box of matches, underwater, while strangling
MacGyver with his feet. In his circumnavigation of the globe, he had built up a network of
land-based radio contacts, colleagues whom he had never met. Through them, he said, he
could get a radio transmission patched into the phone system. We could call home.
