(Aug. 7) -- Researchers shipped out from California this week on a mission to study a man-made problem in the middle of the Pacific: a giant swath of open ocean that has become a floating garbage dump.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch may cover an area once or twice the size of Texas, or about 262,000 to 524,000 square miles. It's located about 1,000 miles west of California and 1,000 miles north of Hawaii in an area called the North Pacific Gyre, where currents from the equator, North America and Asia swirl together and deposit trash, mostly plastic.
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A 'Stretched-Out Bull's-Eye' of Trash
A fishing net entangles a turtle off Hawaii. This week, scientists set out to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area about 1,000 miles from Hawaii that is swirling with trash deposited by ocean currents. Sea trash is a well-known hazard for large sea animals, but researchers are just beginning to look at how it affects smaller animals and microscopic organisms.
Jacob Asher, NOAA
Jacob Asher, NOAA
Much about the patch is a mystery, including its exact size, how much trash has accumulated there, how deep it extends into the water and how it affects ocean life. And studying the garbage is difficult because it hasn't formed one large, visible mass.
"It's not like this is an island. It's not something you can walk on," said Holly Bamford, director of the Marine Debris Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Sometimes you can cruise along for 10 nautical miles and not see anything and then, bam, you come to a hot spot" of visible trash.
"Small particles -- fingernail-size chips -- make up most of it," said Robert Knox, deputy director of research for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. The institution is one of the two main groups involved in the trip to the patch.
Knox described the trash zone as a "stretched-out bull's-eye" that runs from east to west in Pacific.
The expedition is to last three weeks. On Aug. 2, the New Horizon, a Scripps Institution research vessel, took off with a group of graduate students and volunteers who planned to investigate how much trash might be in the gyre, and how it affects sea life, particularly smaller animals.
For example, scientists are interested in finding out whether zooplankton -- microscopic organisms that are a food source for bigger animals -- eat the plastics, and whether it is digestible or poisonous for them, Knox said.
Researchers also want to know whether the trash is helping species move around the globe.
"Do pieces move species and introduce invasive species? What are the implications of the transport of species from Point A to B?" Knox said. "There's quite a web of scientific questions to be put together."
The answers could have major implications for the gyre, one of the Earth's largest ecosystems.
"The question is, how badly are we monkeying with the machinery by using the Pacific as our freebie landfill?" Knox said.
Two days after the Scripps team left, Project Kaisei, a California group whose backers include the recycling industry and other businesses, also headed to the patch. The two teams are cooperating on the research.
While Project Kaisei is also studying the impact of the plastic, it's taking things a step further, looking into ways the trash could be removed and recycled. It could be turned into products like diesel fuel, building materials and clothing, said Mary Crowley, who founded the group.
"We're working on capture technology, all in our effort to figure out the most energy efficient way to collect the debris in the ocean," she said in an interview Thursday from her team's vessel, the sail-powered Kaisei.
The Kaisei was about 300 miles from the garbage patch Thursday afternoon, Crowley said, but people had already begun seeing trash bobbing in the waves. "It surprised us that we're already seeing plastic," she said.
Both groups are blogging about the expedition. You can follow the Scripps team here and the Project Kaisei team here.
In a blog posting Thursday, the chief scientist for the Scripps Institution team said that gathering plastic samples may be tricky.
"Right now, I’m working on the best way to find and sample the plastic," Miriam Goldstein wrote. "Since we don't know what it looks like –- Will we see lots of pieces on the surface? Will it only come up in nets? –- picking the right area to sample will be an interesting challenge."
Bamford, of NOAA, said she is eager to see what the researchers find. NOAA administers the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and has removed 600 metric tons of trash from the 140,000-square-mile preserve since 1996. Sea garbage is a major threat to the area, smothering coral reefs and harming animals including the endangered Hawaiian monk seal.
"We find debris out there coming from all countries. It's an international problem," she said.
The northern Pacific isn't the only place with circulation vortexes where trash accumulates. There's another one in the South Pacific, two in the Atlantic and one in the southern Indian Ocean. But Bamford said the North Pacific Gyre is the only one known to have a large amount of floating debris.
"If it's the size of Texas, twice the size of Texas or the size of Rhode Island, we need to address it," Bamford said.
But people can start taking steps right now to keep the problem from getting worse.
The Ocean Conservancy reported that on its most recent annual waterway cleanup, in September 2008, volunteers retrieved 6.8 million tons of trash, mostly from inland waterways, in 104 countries. Trash that ends up in the ocean comes from hundreds of miles inland, the group said.
"The easiest thing to do to push back against this problem is for people to dispose of plastic properly," said the Scripps Institution's Knox. "Just don't chuck it out by the roadside, because it's going to go downhill and into the ocean."
