60 million square miles of water, stretching from China all the way to California. With some parts deeper than Everest is tall, the Pacific Ocean truly is the deepest and largest ocean on Earth. To attempt to put this into perspective, the total area of Earth’s landmasses put together would still be smaller than the Pacific (North Pacific Ocean, 2020). Despite being such a vast body of water, anthropogenic wastes can already be found in areas that have yet to be explored!
There is an area between California and Hawaii that is currently called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is the current largest garbage patch on Earth. The word “Patch” is such a misleading descriptor as it suggests that there is a huge island of garbage just floating around out there in the middle of the ocean. Instead, the trash is spread out across the water surface and all the way down to the ocean floor! Garbage patches form due to the collective efforts of circular ocean currents called gyres. These currents carry debris from land-based sources into a common location to form these patches of garbage ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, n.d.). While the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the most talked about, it most certainly is not the only patch! In recent years, scientists have found at least 2 more areas where marine debris collects and concentrates, one in the North Atlantic Ocean and another in the South Pacific.
In all these garbage patches, plastics continue to circulate within these parts of the ocean for years, slowly accumulating and posing risks to marine organisms (Lebreton et al., 2018). Most of the plastics found are microplastics which are very tiny plastic pieces that makes them very hard to spot. Of course, there are larger pieces of garbage like fishing gear, called “ghost nets”, which continues to trap and kill unfortunate animals swimming by!
In the next post, I will be continuing on this mini-series and I will be discussing more about the marine debris found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Reference:
Lebreton, L., Slat, B., Ferrari, F., Sainte-Rose, B., Aitken, J., Marthouse, R., Hajbane, S., Cunsolo, S., Schwarz, A., Levivier, A., Noble, K., Debeljak, P., Maral, H., Schoeneich-Argent, R., Brambini, R. and Reisser, J., 2018. Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic. Scientific Reports, 8(1).
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, n.d. Garbage Patches: How Gyres Take Our Trash Out To Sea. [podcast] NOAA Ocean Podcast. Available at: <https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/mar18/nop14-ocean-garbage-patches.html> [Accessed 5 July 2020].
TheFreeDictionary.com. 2020. North Pacific Ocean. [online] Available at: <https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/North+Pacific+Ocean> [Accessed 6 July 2020].
