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
Currents and gyres circulate water and plastics around the world’s oceans Moore was restless not for more racing trophies but for answers He always had been In 1994 he had founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation an organization to help clean up polluted coastal water When he helped design the Alguita he equipped the sailboat with a laboratory to analyze water samples Armed with nets he and a small crew sailed back to the North Pacific gyre in 1999 searching for what Moore called the unseen blanket of granular plastics covering the ocean surface 12 that Ebbesmeyer believed was there Some plastic trash was easy to find Moore observed that similar objects find each other in the middle of millions of square miles of seemingly empty ocean and the ocean stitches
them together making a grotesque whole We dive around this strange mass avoiding the undulating tendrils of rope and net and deciding it could make a convincing sci-fi monster 13 Elsewhere in the gyre they found bobbing bleach bottles shoes toothbrushes bottle caps sour cream containers soda bottles umbrella handles and soccer balls Moore knew the gyre would eventually turn this trash into plastic fragments The Alguita docked in Long Beach California for a summit with students and teachers about plastic pollution Using fine-meshed nets Moore’s crew skimmed the ocean’s surface for nearly 100 miles 161 kilometers The nets are designed to catch plankton tiny organisms that provide food for marine animals of all sizes from sardines to whales The samples captured in the nets were both amazing and
