The NOAA predicted the Great Pacific Garbage patch in a paper in the 80s. There was some evidence from plastic measurements near Alaska, but until Charles Moore sailed through it in 1999 during a race, it had not been proven. Mar 23, 2018 A huge, swirling pile of rubbish in the Pacific Ocean is growing faster than expected and is now three times the size of France, researchers say. The world produces more than 3.5 million tons of garbage a day — and that figure is growing. Drowning in garbage. Plastic shopping bags are still provided in almost every store.
- Great Pacific Garbage Patch Photos
- Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch 2017
- Great Pacific Garbage Patch Problems
- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Satellite Image
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ByKiara Alfonseca
There's an 80,000-ton monster lurking in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California and it's still getting bigger.
Arguably more frightening than any shark, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a rapidly growing hot spot for ocean plastic, carrying 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in what is now the largest accumulation of ocean debris in the world, according to a new report Thursday in Scientific Reports.
The patch is now two times larger than the size of Texas, with bits of plastic and debris spread over more than 600,000 square miles of water, according to the three-year mapping effort from eight different organizations.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that has a high concentration of plastic waste. The extent of the patch has been compared to the U.S. State of Texas or Alaska or even to the country of Afghanistan. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a site of marine debris considered to be twice the size of Texas, is perhaps the foremost expression of the impact of plastic waste on our world and the.
Meanwhile, the annual consumption of plastic is on the rise around the world and currently totals more than 320 million tons, according to the report.
'To solve a problem, we need to understand it first,' said Boyan Slat, CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup, the non-profit organization that led the research initiative. 'There's a good part to it and a bad part to it. The bad part is that there is more [trash and plastic] than what we thought. But the good part is that most of the plastic is still large object. Just 8 percent of the plastic is microplastic. It's not too late to do something about it.'
Nick Mallos, however, isn't surprised by the numbers in the report. Instead, as the director of the Ocean Conservancy's Trash Free Seas Program, he sees this as an opportunity for action.
The most effective way to stop the flow of plastic into waterways, he said, is to monitor our consumption and disposal of plastic and debris.
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Great Pacific Garbage Patch Photos
'We have a role to think about how we are consuming and how we are living our daily lives,' Mallos said. 'At the end of the day, ocean plastic isn't an ocean problem, but a people problem. [The Great Pacific Garbage Patch] can seem so far away and foreign to you, but the ocean is always downstream. We all have the power to make individual, small changes.'
The inflow of plastic is more than the outflow, meaning groups like The Ocean Cleanup and other private or non-profit organizations are continuously looking for ways to stop the course of discarded plastic in its tracks.
The Ocean Cleanup will use this research to improve its methods of cleanup, including its technology to capture, concentrate, and ship the materials from the patch back to land. The technology will be tested in April, according to a spokesperson for the group.
Approximately half of the debris found in the patch is comprised of fishing gear, an alarming statistic for those who study marine life and ocean debris. Mallos describes the gear as 'meant to kill,' and when they are lost and discarded into oceans, they damage ecosystems and become deadly to marine life.
Hunting for ghost gear: What happens when fishing nets go rogue
June 8, 201805:47'This is also consistent with what [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] has found and is concerning because of the impacts this gear can have on a range of marine animals,' wrote Nancy Wallace, the director of the NOAA's Marine Debris Program.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't the only accumulation of debris in the world's oceans, water currents and wind also collect debris is four other areas known as gyres. Those are located in the South Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the North and South Atlantic Ocean.
'Since the marine debris issue is caused by humans, we can make great strides in turning this problem around,' wrote Wallace. 'We need to focus on generating less waste and stopping the flow of debris into our waterways and ocean. This will take significant effort, but awareness around this issue is growing and people are willing to make changes to make an impact'
Red baron 3d full canvas jacket free. An enormous area of rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean is teeming with far more debris than previously thought, heightening alarm that the world’s oceans are being increasingly choked by trillions of pieces of plastic.
The sprawling patch of detritus – spanning 1.6m sq km, (617,763 sq miles) more than twice the size of France – contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic, new research published in Scientific Reports has found. This mass of waste is up to 16 times larger than previous estimates and provides a sobering challenge to a team that will start an ambitious attempt to clean up the vast swath of the Pacific this summer.
The analysis, conducted by boat and air surveys taken over two years, found that pollution in the so-called Great Pacific garbage patch is almost exclusively plastic and is “increasing exponentially”. Microplastics, measuring less than 0.5cm (0.2in), make up the bulk of the estimated 1.8tn pieces floating in the garbage patch, which is kept in rough formation by a swirling ocean gyre.
While tiny fragments of plastic are the most numerous, nearly half of the weight of rubbish is composed of discarded fishing nets. Other items spotted in the stew of plastic include bottles, plates, buoys, ropes and even a toilet seat.
“I’ve been doing this research for a while, but it was depressing to see,” said Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer and lead author of the study. Lebreton works for the Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch-based non-profit that is aiming to tackle the garbage patch.
“There were things you just wondered how they made it into the ocean. There’s clearly an increasing influx of plastic into the garbage patch.
“We need a coordinated international effort to rethink and redesign the way we use plastics. The numbers speak for themselves. Things are getting worse and we need to act now.”
Plastic has proven a usefully durable and versatile product but has become a major environmental blight, tainting drinking water and rivers. Around 8m tons of plastic ends up in the oceans every year, where it washes up on beaches or drifts out to sea where the pieces very slowly break down over hundreds of years.
Larger pieces of plastic pollution can entangle and kill marine creatures, while tiny fragments are eaten by small fish and find their way up the food chain. Plastic often attracts toxic pollutants that are then ingested and spread by marine life. Yahoo messenger full version. It’s estimated there will be more waste plastic in the sea than fish by the year 2050.
Drowning In Plastic The Great Pacific Garbage Patch 2017
Much of the plastic waste accumulates in five circular ocean currents – known as gyres – found around the globe. The Ocean Cleanup has pledged a “moonshot” effort to clean up half of the Great Pacific garbage patch within five years and mop up the other rubbish-strewn gyres by 2040.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch Problems
The organization is developing a system of large floating barriers with underwater screens that capture and concentrate plastics into one area ready to be scooped out of the ocean. A prototype, to be launched from San Francisco this summer with the aim of spawning a clutch of devices each of which can collect five tons of waste a month, will, if successful, be followed by dozens of other boom-like systems measuring up to 2km (1.2 miles) long.
The project comes with caveats, however – its system will not catch the proliferation of microplastics measuring under 10 millimeters (0.39in) and the whole operation will require further funding from next year. Any successful clean-up may also be overwhelmed by a global surge in plastic production – a recent UK government report warned the amount of plastic in the ocean could treble within the next decade.
“There is a big mine of microplastics there coming from larger stuff that’s crumbling down, so we need to get in there quickly to clean it up,” said Joost Dubois, a spokesman for the Ocean Cleanup.
“But we also need to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place. If we don’t manage the influx of plastics we will be the garbagemen of the ocean forever, which isn’t our ambition.”
The problem of plastic pollution is gaining traction in diplomatic circles, with nearly 200 countries signing on to a UN resolution last year that aims to stem the flood of plastic into the oceans. However, the agreement has no timetable and is not legally binding.
Dr Clare Steele, a California-based marine ecologist who was not involved in the research, said the study provided “great progress” in understanding the composition of the Great Pacific garbage patch. Pdf xchange viewer 2.5 key.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Satellite Image
But she regretted that while removing larger items, such as ghost fishing nets, would help wildlife, the clean-up would not deal with the colossal amount of microplastic.
“Those plankton-sized pieces of plastic are pretty difficult to clean up,” she said. “The only way is to address the source and that will require a radical shift on how we use materials, particularly single-use plastic such as cutlery, straws and bottles that are so durable.
“We need to reduce waste and come up with new, biodegradable alternatives to plastic. But one of the easiest steps is changing the way we use and discard the more ephemeral plastic products.”