so great that it threatened the survival not only of his crew but of organisms all over the globe On August 8 while standing on deck Moore saw something unexpected Here and there odd bits and flakes speckle the ocean’s surface 1 he later wrote in the book Plastic Ocean How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans He was disturbed because the objects were plastic He said it looked as if a giant salt shaker has sprinkled bits of plastic onto the surface of the ocean 2 Each day he scanned the water and found that No matter the time of day or how many times a day I look it’s never more than a few minutes before I sight a plastic morsel bobbing by A bottle here a bottle cap there scraps of plastic film fragments of rope or fishing net broken-down bits of former things 3 For seven days the Alguita traveled more than a thousand miles with Moore noticing that They were always there plastic shards fluttering like lost moths in the surface waters of the deep remote ocean 4 Moore returned to Alamitos Bay California where he had spent his youth swimming surfing and sailing in the Pacific Ocean By the 1980s he wrote pollution of many kinds made residents think twice about eating a fish they caught off the pier 5 Now he wrote that he could not stop thinking about all
those miles and days of plastic Over the decades we’d gotten used to the sight of trash on the beach by the roadsides and in riverbeds of shopping bags fluttering on fences and branches But something seemed very wrong about this plastic trash in the mid-Pacific 6 He wanted to know why it was there A National Aeronautics and Space Administration map of ocean currents depicts warm surface currents in red and deep ocean currents in blue Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer offered Moore an explanation Since the 1990s Ebbesmeyer had studied how plastic trash moves through the ocean He depended on a network of volunteers to report what trash washed up on shores When containers of manufactured goods slipped off ships Ebbesmeyer mapped the travels of their buoyant plastic contents to beaches around the world In 1992 an accidental spill of thousands of plastic bath toys into the Pacific Ocean sent yellow ducks washing up along the U S West Coast and Hawaii We
always knew that this gyre existed Ebbesmeyer said But until the ducks came along we didn’t know how long it took to complete a circuit 7 For more than a decade ducks traveled and landed on shores in South America Europe Australia and even the Arctic Ebbesmeyer realized that the 11 gyres in the world’s oceans along with ocean currents work together like a giant conveyor belt circulating seawater and everything floating in it Ebbesmeyer convinced Moore that a gyre’s slow-moving water does not simply carry plastic bits of trash it creates them First a gyre’s currents work with a toilet bowl effect of dragging the debris from the rim and bringing it into the center 8 Moore said But it never flushes It just keeps adding and adding 9 In this trash vortex plastic trash remains trapped for years Under the sun’s ultraviolet rays plastic turns pale and brittle It breaks apart in the salty water as waves jostle it endlessly Gyres slowly shred plastic into bits called microplastics More than 90 percent of the plastic at sea might be smaller than a grain of rice Ebbesmeyer has estimated that a 1-liter plastic bottle crumbles into enough microplastic pieces to put one on every square mile of the world’s beaches A PORTRAIT OF PLASTIC Plastic trash in the North Pacific gyre is now visible from space While surveying the zone from an aircraft researcher Boyan Slat was
dismayed to see debris everywhere Every half second you see something It was impossible to record everything It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean 10 But locating the nearly invisible microplastics in the ocean takes computer modeling software and a lot of patience Researchers sail into gyres with nets called trawls that drag behind their boats The nets skim the surface collecting microplastics Researchers count the microplastics caught in the tiny mesh with the help of tweezers and sometimes with a microscope Computer technicians combine new data and thousands of measurements of microplastics collected since the 1970s with information about currents to create maps of where microplastics could be floating But the maps are only guesses Vast parts of the ocean have not been sampled especially in the Southern Hemisphere What’s more floating plastic accounts for only 1 percent of the plastic that enters oceans so much of plastic’s ocean journey remains a mystery We must learn more about the pathway and ultimate fate of the missing plastic 11 said marine ecologist Andres Cozar Cabañas
