The world's rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan
by Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden
A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at
an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the
continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris - in effect the world's largest rubbish
dump - is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting
"soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian
coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as
Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great
Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100
million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a
research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation,
which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people
had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost
walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It
is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental
United States."
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam,
has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years
and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like
a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as
it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic.
"The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this
confetti of plastic," he added.
The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands
of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches.
About one-fifth of the junk - which includes everything from
footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags - is thrown off
ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.Mr Moore, a former
sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a
short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered
his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" - a vortex where the ocean
circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure
systems. Usually sailors avoid it.
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after
day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was
trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled
such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"Professor David Karl,
an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was
needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that
there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.
"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time
we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine
ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."
Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of
the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk
actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in
oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that
objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump.
"Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that
made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady,
a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute. Mr Moore said
that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the
water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You
only see it from the bows of ships," he said.
Courtesy: The Independent
|