“Literally my stomach just started getting in knots,” the scuba instructor says. “I felt ill.”
Owen had noticed an alarming volume of plastic in and around the water during a trip to Southeast Asia.
“I actually saw a fish shit a piece of plastic when I was in Bali,” he says.
It was enough to inspire Owen to look into the patch and ways to clean it up. The ECC’s Gyre Cleanup Project is still in the larval stage, but a public awareness campaign, including a benefit this Saturday at the Iao Theater, is quickly spreading the word.
“When I look at the Earth as a whole I look at the ocean as the earth’s blood,” Rich said. “It’s where life began.”
It takes less than a year for trash to travel from Asian waters to the patch and up to five years from the America’s west coast. Eighty percent of it comes from land; the other 20 percent comes from seafaring vessels. But it all gets trapped in the horse latitudes.
Items found include hard hats, toothbrushes, bottle caps and kayaks. Much of the debris has broken down into tiny fragments, researchers say, and fish and birds in the area are ingesting them.
Sea captain and ocean researcher Charles Moore said in a 2008 NPR interview that the area of the garbage patch itself is estimated to be twice the size of Texas, and growing every day. Moore motored through it during a trans-Pacific sailboat race in the early ‘90s and was appalled by what he saw, saying that, in the week that it took to pass through the area he “was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.”
http://www.mauitime.com/Articles-i-2009-01-29-68584.113117_The_great_garbage_swirl.htmlIt was no surprise that Moore, having grown up by the ocean and raised by an avid sailor, founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994. This organization, based in Long Beach, California, started out studying the ocean’s chemical and bacterial properties, but their focus changed after Moore discovered the seemingly endless plastic soup during his unforgettable race.
Algalita quotes Moore on the subject: “there were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.”
Scientists estimate the swirling mass of plastics and debris is two times the size of Texas. In fact, the Pacific gyre has now separated into two ever increasing patches known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches (combined, they are called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). This oceanic dumping ground is now a major spot for studying the effects of plastics on marine life.
http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/editor/muhawi/2009/01/29/algalita-shrinking-the-worlds-largest-garbage-patch/http://www.algalita.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=135
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