The Pacific Ocean - About More Garbage

The Pacific Ocean - About More Garbage 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch mentioned in my previous blog has sadly been joined by garbage from the Japanese tsunami. This garbage joins this ocean of debris, including basketball shoes, ice hockey gloves, a motorbike, golf clubs, and a football belonging to a Japanese schoolboy These are just some of the estimated 4.8 million tonnes of debris swept into the sea by the terrible tsunami in Japan, bits of which have already washed up on the shores of Alaska and Canada.

Around two-thirds of it sank off the coast of Japan, but the rest is now drifting across the Pacific towards North America, stretching across an estimated 6300 kilometres of ocean. Much of it will swirl around for ever in the fabled garbage patch in the north Pacific.
The problem with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is that it's hard to spot. Most of it consists of tiny bits of plastic, forming a thin and constantly shifting film on the surface of the ocean. Garbage patchologists say it's twice the size of Texas, and has been likened to ''a big toilet that never flushes''. 

Indeed, there is little indigenous pollution, yet smaller islands and reefs of Hawaii for example, are littered with fishing lines, bottle tops, Lego pieces, golf tees, plastic bottles, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, syringes, tyres, petrol cans and plastic dinosaurs, swept there by the currents of the north Pacific subtropical gyre. 

The patch formed due to oceanic gyres—rotating systems of ocean currents that have a whirlpool-like effect on debris. In the center, there is very little current, leaving all the plastic stuck in one giant spot. Similar garbage patches have formed in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Southern Hemisphere, although the Pacific Ocean patch is believed to be the largest and most-studied.

Experts disagree on where most of the plastic comes from—some have estimated that 80 percent of it comes from land sources, others say more of it is from shipping junk—but they agree there's little the public can currently do about it. While plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, it never fully decomposes, so what's left behind in the ocean is there indefinitely. At the moment it is simply not cost-effective to skim the surface of the ocean to remove this garbage.

No one can blame the Japanese for the latest surge of garbage, however, for the great tide of crap that is flooding the Pacific, the rest of us will have to carry the can.

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Jane Resture's Re-posted Message: Our Pacific Ocean - About Rubbish

Our Pacific Ocean - About Rubbish

Welcome everybody to Jane's blog where you are invited to share your thoughts and experiences about our beautiful Pacific Ocean. I do not want to start out on a negative note, however, I would like to thank those people who have written in expressing concern about the amount of litter that they have encountered in various parts of the Pacific.These comments are of particular concern in the light of recent reports describing the Pacific Ocean as the world's largest rubbish dump - a vast area of floating plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents.

Often referred to as the great Pacific garbage patch, it is now alarming some with its ever-growing size and possible impact on human health.The "patch" is, in fact, two huge linked areas of circulating rubbish, stretching from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan. Almost twice the size as continental United States, the islands of Hawaii are placed almost in the middle, so piles of plastic are regularly washed up on some beaches there. The concentration of floating plastic debris just beneath the ocean's surface is the product of underwater currents, which conspire to bring together all the junk - an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic - that accumulates in the Pacific Ocean. Studies have indicated that about 20 per cent of the junk is thought to come from marine craft, while the rest originates from countries around the Pacific like Mexico, Australia and China. The waste forms in what are called tropical gyres - areas where the oceans slowly circulate due to extreme high pressure systems and where there is little wind. Historically, flotsam in the gyres has biodegraded..But modern plastics do not break down like other oceanic debris, meaning objects half a century old have been found in the North Pacific Gyre. Rather the plastic slowly photodegrades, becoming brittle and disintegrating into smaller and smaller pieces which enter the food chain and end up in the stomachs of birds and other animals. This is certainly a very sorry state of affairs as the small plastic particles acted like a sponge to trap many dangerous man-made chemicals that found their way into the ocean, like hydrocarbons and DDT. Eventually what goes into the ocean goes into the animals and eventually enters the human food chain exposing people worldwide to possible serious longer term health problems. Indeed syringes, cigarette lighters and tooth brushes from the "patch" have been found inside the carcases of sea birds.

The health of our planet depends upon many factors including the health of our vast Pacific Ocean. Certainly, the health of this beautiful Ocean cannot be improved if it continues to be used as nothing more than a convenient garbage dump.

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