The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
"It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean."
(Moore, 2009)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge patch of litter, predominately microplastics, spread across the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in the North Pacific Ocean. When thinking of a ‘great garbage patch’ images of a major floating rubbish dump come to mind, however the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more “akin to a peppery soup” (Parker, 2014), with a majority of its rubbish being microplastics. None-the-less, there is also a vast amount of floating rubbish in the garbage patch, which is pulled in towards the centre of the patch by the whirlpool affect of the ocean gyre it is situated in. One can imagine that a floating garbage patch such as this would be sure to cause issues in the environment. The microplastics, especially, are a big problem, as a lot of marine life are dying with the plastics being found in their stomachs. The most common species being affected by microplastics are albatrosses, which mistake the plastic for food and consequently consume and regurgitate the “food” to their chicks. Hundreds of thousands of albatrosses are dying with “…stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters” (Moore, 2009). Many of the fish at the bottom of the food chain are also being affected by the consumption of microplastics, which is a problem that could affect the entire food chain as long as fish are continuing to consume marine debris.
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Discovery
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a problem that has been forming over the past several decades. In 1988, the first theory on the problem was formed when NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) published a paper predicting the accumulation of a “marine wasteland” (Discovery Communications, 2011), based on water samples they had collected. However, the first visual discovery of the patch wasn’t until 1997, when Captain Charles Moore, on his way home from a racing-boat trip, found himself surrounded by garbage.