Two expeditions—including one that sets sail next week—will visit the Pacific Ocean’s spiraling trash heap this summer to call attention to plastic pollution (above, a trash-covered beach in Southeast Asia). The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii, is created by ocean currents that pick up millions of tons of the world’s discarded plastic.
It may lack the allure of the North Pole or Mount Everest, but a Pacific Ocean trash dump twice the size of Texas is this summer’s hot destination for explorers.
The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii, is created by ocean currents that pick up millions of tons of the world’s discarded plastic.
As much as 10 percent of the 260 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in the oceans, much of it in trash vortices like the Pacific garbage patch.
This summer, two separate expeditions will set sail for the patch to document the scope of the problem and call global attention to disastrous ocean pollution.
“Every single person who has ever been to a beach anywhere has seen plastic, even in the remotest of places,” said Doug Woodring, head of the ocean-health nonprofit Project Kaisei that will launch two boats next week.
The 174-foot (53-meter) New Horizon, owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, leaves San Diego with Kaisei team members on August 2. The expedition’s flagship 150-foot (46-meter) Kaisei pushes off from San Francisco on August 4.
(Follow the Kaisei expedition’s progress with an interactive voyage tracker.)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-ocean-trash-pacific.html
