The Northern Pacific Becomes A Sargasso Sea Of Garbage - Globe & Mail

[hatrack]

"A car tire. A Japanese traffic cone. Ten-year-old water jugs. Fishing floats from China and Russia. Miles of tangled fishing nets. This is some of the bounty found floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area called the North Pacific subtropical gyre, which lies between Hawaii and California. Charles Moore, sea captain, sailor and ocean crusader, describes the area's combination of winds and currents as creating "a sort of toilet-bowl effect where you've got a little bit of depression in the middle and a circulating current brings stuff from the edges into the centre."

Since 1999, Capt. Moore has been trawling the ocean's garbage patches in his 50-foot catamaran research vessel Alguita ("little kelp plant" in Spanish). "It makes me very upset because I'm basically a marine mammal and my habitat is now trashed," he says.

He came across the gyre back in 1997, as he was returning home from a regatta in Hawaii, and decided to take a shortcut. The North Pacific subtropical gyre is an area of flat calm that sailors tend to avoid like the plague. His craft, however, was equipped with twin diesels and an extra fuel bladder, so he headed into it. Its currents collect decades worth of garbage. For 10 straight days, he couldn't look over the side without seeing plastic debris.

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When he examined several specimens of jellyfish from the Pacific under a microscope, he saw long slivers of fishing line and chunks of shredded bags embedded in their bodies. He also took pictures of albatross chicks literally filled with plastic bottle caps, lighters and balloons. "People have seen the mother birds cough up a plastic toothbrush to give to the chicks," says Capt. Moore. "It's tragic." A former chemistry major and veteran of a Sixties Berkeley commune, Capt. Moore has used his personal inheritance from his family's sulphur plant to fund his non-profit organization, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation."

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[mmm]

1. Damn! the ocean is so vast and wide

[madrchsod]

2. last night on national geographic

a photographer was on a pacific atoll filming ..at the end of his stay he had all kinds of plastic crap- a shoe,doll,corvette,bottles etc,etc, and a Ronald McDonald plastic trinket...