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
disturbing said Moore Not one is free of plastic 14 Plankton formed a jellylike mass but it was sprinkled with plastic chips The crew filled 11 jars with samples that resembled glass snow globes swirling with multicolored plastic snow 15 Moore wrote Moore hauled home barnacle and algae-covered plastic garbage from the three-week voyage He displayed it on the Alguita’s deck for journalists to photograph But Moore’s attention was on the gyre sample jars headed for the laboratory If our results are what we think they’ll be we’ll make noise and be heard Good people will be moved to action 16 he wrote Technicians painstakingly separated natural from human made materials and weighed them The results were astounding the microplastics in the samples weighed six times as much as the plankton I wasn’t the first to be disturbed about plastic trash in the ocean and I wasn’t the first to study it said Moore But maybe I was the first to freak out about it 17 He said his new data showed that the debris was like a ticking time bomb The data would show people that their ocean is turning into plastic stew If they knew they might begin to see plastics in a new way maybe handle them more carefully maybe begin to make different choices 18 At first scientists were skeptical of studies
by this self-taught scientist But like the wind filling sails journalists swept the dramatic story into the public eye A Pulitzer Prize winning series in the Los Angeles Times included Moore’s findings in 2006 Headlines called the polluted gyre the World’s Largest Dump The name Great Pacific Garbage Patch caught on The microplastics in Moore’s samples collected in the Pacific Ocean far outweighed the plankton The public did not fully understand what Moore had found When he described the plastic-stricken area as being twice the size of Texas people imagined an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on 19 said Moore’s colleague Marcus Eriksen Moore explained that the gyre is more like a soup lightly seasoned with plastic flakes bulked out here and there
