Garbage island in the Pacific Ocean: the terrifying consequences of human actions (photo). If there really is a big garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, where are the photos of it?
“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “North Pacific Gyre”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, as this giant island of garbage is called, which is growing at a gigantic pace. There has been talk about garbage island for more than half a century, but virtually no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being caused to the environment, and entire species of animals are becoming extinct. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be fixed.
Pollution started from the time plastic was invented. On the one hand, it is an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It makes it easier until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic takes more than a hundred years to decompose and, thanks to ocean currents, gathers into huge islands. One such island (larger than the US state of Texas) floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris being dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean creatures) suffer the most. Plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean is responsible for the death of more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100 thousand marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these objects, mistaking them for food.
"Trash Island" has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the characteristics of the North Pacific Current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, the current mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and its area is more than a million square kilometers. "Island" has a number unofficial names: “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Eastern Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, etc. In Russian it is sometimes also called “garbage iceberg”. In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island area by six times.
This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact the largest landfill on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of underwater currents that have turbulence. The swath of "soup" stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the North Pacific Ocean, past Hawaii and just shy of distant Japan.
American oceanographer Charles Moore - the discoverer of this “great Pacific garbage patch,” also known as the “garbage gyre,” believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen , Director of Science (USA), founded Moore, said: “Initially people assumed that this was an island from plastic waste, on which you can almost walk. This view is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It’s simply endless—perhaps twice the size of the continental United States.” The story of Moore's discovery of the garbage patch is quite interesting: 14 years ago, a yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to test his new yacht. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.
“For a week, every time I went on deck, plastic junk floated past,” Moore wrote in his book “ Plastics are Forever ? “I couldn’t believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge area of water?” I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight...”
Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and founded an environmental organization with the proceeds. Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would await the current report. AMRF, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say he is the son of a famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau , who went to film a new film in Hawaii, almost had a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic has not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, Moore's name has not left the pages of American media. Recently the founder AMRF warned that unless consumers limit their use of non-recyclable plastics, the surface area of the “garbage soup” will double in the next 10 years and threaten not only Hawaii, but all Pacific Rim countries.
But in general they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island; its consistency resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in the water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70% of all plastic that gets here sinks to the bottom layers, so we don’t even exactly imagine how much trash can accumulate there. Since plastic is transparent and lies directly below the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from a satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of a ship or when scuba diving. But sea vessels They rarely visit this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for the fact that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Gyre is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no one's.
Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer , a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage dump cycle to a living creature: “It moves around the planet like a large animal let off a leash.” When this animal approaches land - and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case - the results are quite dramatic. “As soon as a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered with this plastic confetti,” testifies Ebbesmeyer.
According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, replete with debris, poses a risk to human health. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting as chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs along with food. “What ends up in the ocean ends up in the stomachs of ocean creatures and then on your plate. Everything is very simple".
The main ocean polluters are China and India. Here it is considered common practice to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water.
There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical eddy here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade wind currents and inter-trade wind countercurrents. The North Pacific Whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where a wide variety of rubbish has been carried for centuries from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, ship wrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific Whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, no mammals, no birds. No one except colonies of zooplankton. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here, even military and merchant ships try to avoid this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.
Since the early 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly subject to biological decay processes and do not disappear anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90% plastic, with a total mass six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of all garbage patches even exceeds the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge accumulation of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean. The slick is made up of plastic and other man-made waste that was picked up by a gyre current in the North Pacific Ocean. Despite its size and significant density, the spot is not visible on satellite photographs because it consists of small particles. In addition, most of the garbage floats in a slightly submerged state, hiding under water.
The existence of a garbage continent was theoretically predicted back in 1988. The forecast was based on data collected in Alaska between 1985 and 1988. A study of the amount of drifting plastic in the surface waters of the North Pacific Ocean found that a lot of debris accumulates in areas subject to certain ocean currents. Data on Sea of Japan led the researchers to speculate that similar accumulations could be found in other parts of the Pacific Ocean, where prevailing currents contribute to the formation of a relatively calm water surface. In particular, scientists pointed to the North Pacific Current System. A few years later, the existence of a huge garbage patch was documented by Charles Moore, a Californian captain and marine explorer. While sailing through the North Pacific Current system after participating in a regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the ocean surface. Captain Moore reported his discovery to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who subsequently named the area the Eastern Garbage Continent. The existence of a garbage patch attracted the attention of the public and scientific circles after the publication of several articles by Charles Moore. Since then, the Great Garbage Patch has been considered the largest example of human pollution in the marine environment.
Like other areas of the world's oceans with high levels of trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was formed by ocean currents that gradually concentrated trash thrown into the ocean into one area. The Garbage Patch occupies a large, relatively stable area in the northern Pacific Ocean, bounded by the North Pacific Current System (an area often referred to as the "horse latitudes", or calm latitudes). The system's vortex collects debris from throughout the North Pacific, including coastal waters North America and Japan. The waste is picked up by surface currents and gradually moves to the center of the whirlpool, which does not release the waste beyond its boundaries.
The exact size of the large spot is unknown. It is impossible to estimate its size from aboard a ship, and the spot is not visible from an airplane. We can glean most of the information about the garbage patch only from theoretical calculations. Estimates of its area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of the Pacific Ocean). There are probably over one hundred million tons of trash in this area. It is also suggested that the garbage continent consists of two combined areas.
According to Charles Moore's calculations, 80% of the debris in the slick comes from land-based sources, and 20% is thrown from the decks of ships on the high seas. Moore argues that waste from east coast Asia moves to the center of the whirlpool in about five years, and from west coast North America - in a year or less.
A garbage patch is not a continuous layer of debris floating on the surface itself. Degraded plastic particles are mostly too small to be seen visually. To roughly estimate the density of pollution, scientists examine water samples. In 2001, scientists (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the garbage patch, the concentration of plastic was already reaching a million particles per square mile. There were 3.34 pieces of plastic per square meter with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams. In many places in the contaminated region, the total concentration of plastic was seven times higher than the concentration of zooplankton. In samples taken at greater depths, the level of plastic waste was found to be significantly lower (mainly fishing lines). Thus, previous observations were confirmed that most plastic waste accumulates in the upper water layers.
Some plastic particles resemble zooplankton, and jellyfish or fish may mistake them for food. A large number of Hard-to-degrade plastic (bottle caps and rings, disposable lighters) ends up in the stomachs of seabirds and animals, in particular sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.
Thus, humanity has once again created a problem for itself. Much plastic decomposes very slowly. For example, the biological decomposition of polyethylene takes about two hundred years; polyvinyl chloride releases unsafe products when decomposed. Activities are planned to clean up the ocean surface using flotillas of specially equipped ships, but this is difficult to implement in practice, and, in addition, the collected garbage still needs to be processed. If we cannot solve the problem, we should not at least aggravate it. The first thing to do is to reduce the amount of waste entering the ocean and increase the production of packaging made from biodegradable plastics.
Regarding garbage patches in the ocean, people, based on shocking photographs of “garbage continents,” may think that entire islands consisting of garbage are moving around the sea.
In reality, these patches are large areas of water with high concentrations of plastic in the upper ocean. On average, there are about three pieces of plastic weighing several milligrams per square meter.
Increasing consumption of the population and the growth of the global economy are accelerating the oceans. Floating in the ocean comes as no surprise to anyone.
Garbage patches are formed by ocean currents and eddies. In each of the oceans - the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic - there are the most polluted areas - garbage areas.
Garbage “catch” of a sea expedition
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The largest “plastic soup” called the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is located in the North Pacific Ocean.
The upper layers of this spot contain the highest concentration of plastic debris compared to other spots. These are small pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. Large pieces of plastic, as a result of the process of photodegradation, break down into smaller ones while maintaining the polymer structure.
According to the researchers, plastic waste in the area covers an area of about 5 million square miles, with a total waste weight of more than 11 million tons. And this spot is only increasing as a result of constant replenishment from the continents.
Formation of garbage spots. NASA
Garbage patches in other oceans
In 2010, a garbage patch was discovered in the Indian Ocean. The stain consists of debris particles in the upper layer of water. Located in the central part Indian Ocean. The process of degradation of pieces of plastic is the same as in other oceans - disintegration into smaller particles while maintaining the polymer structure.
Garbage patch area in Atlantic Ocean is estimated at hundreds of kilometers. The density of garbage particles is more than 200 thousand pieces per square kilometer.
The dangers of plastic waste to marine life
Fish and other creatures living in the water can be injured or even die as a result of interacting with floating waste. Fish may mistakenly eat plastic pieces, mistaking them for food. The plastic stays inside their bodies and ends up on the table of the person who bought the fish at the store. This is how a person receives retribution for his consumer attitude towards nature. How plastic will affect human health is another serious issue.
It is necessary to take care of the cleanliness of ocean waters and try to find ways to eliminate the negative impact of human activities on the ecology of the ocean.
Ways to solve the problem of garbage in the world's oceans
One of the options for cleaning the ocean from plastic is to use special technical means that would autonomously collect plastic. Thus, Boyan Slet from the University of Technology (Netherlands) presented a project to create platforms that would collect ocean garbage.
But the effectiveness of this idea is questionable due to the size of the world's oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth's surface. How many platforms need to be built that would fish objects out of the water?
The most effective and at the same time time-consuming way to solve the problem is to take measures on earth against the uncontrolled spread of plastic waste, to look for ways to replace plastics in production with more environmentally friendly materials.
In the Pacific Ocean there is an unusual island that is not shown on any map of the world. Meanwhile, the area of this place, which has become a real disgrace to our planet, already exceeds the territory of France. The fact is that humanity produces garbage, which increases every day and covers new territories not only on earth. Residents of aquatic ecosystems, who have experienced all the delights of civilization in recent decades, are suffering extremely.
Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the real environmental situation and the dirty heritage of humanity. The problem of marine debris, which causes irreparable damage to the environment, is not made public, but, according to rough estimates, the weight of plastic that releases toxic substances is more than one hundred million tons.
How does trash end up in the ocean?
Where does garbage come from in the ocean if people don’t live there? More than 80% of waste comes from land-based sources, and the bulk of it consists of plastic water bottles, bags, and cups. In addition, at sea they find themselves fishing nets and containers lost from ships. Two countries are considered the main polluters - China and India, where residents dump garbage directly into the water.
Two sides of plastic
We can say that from the moment plastic was invented, the total pollution of the green planet began. The material that made people's lives much easier has turned into a real poison for the earth and ocean when it gets there after use. Cheap plastics that take more than a hundred years to decompose and are so easy to get rid of cause serious damage to the environment.
This problem has been talked about for more than fifty years, but environmentalists only sounded the alarm at the beginning of 2000, since a new continent consisting of waste appeared on the planet. Underwater currents have driven plastic debris into garbage islands in the ocean, which find themselves in a kind of trap and cannot leave it. It is not possible to say exactly how much unnecessary trash the planet stores.
Garbage Island of Death
The largest landfill, which is located in the Pacific basin, goes 30 meters deep and stretches from California to the Hawaiian Islands for hundreds of kilometers. For decades, plastic floated in the water until it formed a huge island, growing at a catastrophic pace. According to researchers, its mass now exceeds the mass of zooplankton by almost seven times.
A Pacific trash island made of plastic that crumbles into small pieces when exposed to salt and sun is held in place by underwater currents. There is a subtropical whirlpool here, which is called the “desert of the World Ocean.” Various rubbish has been brought here from different parts of the world for many years, and due to the abundance of rotting animal corpses and wet wood, the water is saturated with hydrogen sulfide. This is a real dead zone, extremely poor in life. In a fetid place, where a fresh wind never blows, merchant and military ships do not enter, trying to avoid it.
But after the 50s of the last century, the situation worsened sharply, and plastic packaging, bags and bottles that are not subject to biological decay processes were added to the remains with algae. Now the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, the area of which increases several times every ten years, is 90% polyethylene.
Danger to birds and marine life
Mammals living in water take waste as food, which gets stuck in the stomach, and soon die. They become entangled in debris, suffering fatal injuries. Birds feed their chicks with small, sharp pellets that resemble eggs, which leads to their death. Ocean trash also poses a danger to humans, because many marine life that end up inside it are poisoned by plastic.
Debris floating on the surface of the ocean blocks the sun's rays, threatening the normal functioning of plankton and algae, which support the ecosystem by producing nutrients. Their disappearance will lead to the death of many species of marine life. The garbage island, consisting of plastic that does not decompose in water, poses a danger to all living beings.
Giant garbage dump
Recent studies conducted by scientists have shown that the bulk of the garbage is tiny plastic particles about five millimeters in size, which are distributed both on the surface and in the middle layers of water. Because of this, it is not possible to find out the true extent of the pollution, since it is impossible to see the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean from a satellite or airplane. Firstly, about 70% of the trash sinks to the bottom, and secondly, transparent particles of plastic lie under the surface of the water, and it is simply unrealistic to see them from above. The giant polyethylene stain can only be seen from a ship that comes close to it, or when scuba diving. Some scientists claim that its area is approximately 15 million kilometers.
Changing Ecosystem Balance
When studying pieces of plastic found in water, it was found that they were densely populated with microbes: about a thousand bacteria were found per millimeter, both harmless and capable of causing disease. It turned out that garbage is changing the ocean, and it is impossible to predict what consequences this will lead to, but people are highly dependent on the existing ecosystem.
The Pacific spot is not the only dump on the planet; there are five more large and several small dumps in the world in the waters of Antarctica and Alaska. No specialist can say for sure what the degree of contamination is.
Discoverer of an island made of floating junk
Of course, the existence of such a phenomenon as a garbage island had long been predicted by famous oceanographers, but only 20 years ago, Captain Charles Moore, returning from a regatta, discovered millions of plastic particles around his yacht. He didn’t even realize that he had swam into a trash heap that had no end. Charles, interested in the problem, founded an environmental organization dedicated to the study of the Pacific Ocean.
At first, the yachtsman’s reports, where he warned about the threat looming over humanity, were simply brushed aside. It was only after a severe storm that washed up tons of plastic garbage on the beaches of the Hawaiian Islands, causing the death of thousands of animals and birds, that the name Moore became known throughout the world.
Cautions
After studies were carried out during which carcinogenic substances used in the production of reusable bottles were discovered in sea water, the American warned that the continued use of polyethylene would begin to threaten the entire planet. “Plastic that absorbs chemicals is incredibly toxic,” said the discoverer of the island, which consists of floating trash. Marine life absorb the poison, and the ocean has turned into plastic soup."
First, garbage particles end up in the stomachs of underwater inhabitants, and then migrate to people’s plates. Thus, polyethylene becomes a link in the food chain, which is fraught with fatal diseases for people, because scientists have long proven the presence of plastic in the human body.
"Animal off the leash"
The trash island, whose surface cannot be walked on, consists of tiny particles that form a cloudy soup. Environmentalists compared it to a large animal that was let off a leash. Once the dump reaches dry land, chaos ensues. There are known cases when beaches were covered with plastic “confetti”, which not only spoiled tourists’ holidays, but also led to the death of sea turtles.
However, the garbage island destroying the natural ecosystem, the photo of which was circulated in all world publications devoted to ecology, is gradually turning into a real atoll with a solid surface. And this very frightens modern scientists, who believe that soon cluttered areas will become entire continents.
Landfill
More recently, the public has been shocked by the fact that the Maldives, which has a huge tourism industry, produces too much trash. Luxury hotels do not sort it for recycling, as required by regulations, but rather dump it into a single pile. Some boatmen, who do not want to wait in line to dump waste, simply throw it into the water, and what remains ends up on the artificially created garbage island of Thilafushi, which has turned into a city dump.
This corner, not reminiscent of paradise, is located not far from the place, different from the usual resorts, where residents try to find things suitable for sale, a cloud of black smog hangs from fires with rubbish. The landfill is expanding towards the sea, and severe water pollution has already begun, and the government has not solved the problem of waste disposal. There are tourists who come to Thilafushi specifically to see the man-made disaster up close.
Scary facts
In 2012, experts from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography examined contaminated sites off the coast of California and found that in just forty years the amount of garbage had increased a hundredfold. And this state of affairs is very worrying for researchers, because there is a high probability that a moment will come when it will be impossible to correct anything.
Unsolved problem
No country in the world is ready to clean up contaminated sites, and Charles Moore confidently stated that this could ruin even the richest state. A garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, photos of which cause fear for the future of the planet, is located in neutral waters, and it turns out that the floating trash is no one’s property. In addition, this is not only very expensive, but also practically impossible, since small plastic particles are the same size as plankton, and nets have not yet been developed that could separate debris from small marine inhabitants. And no one knows what to do with the waste that has settled at the bottom for many years.
Scientists warn that it is possible to prevent waste from entering the water if people fail to clean up trash islands in the ocean. Photos of giant landfills make every inhabitant of the Earth think about the conditions in which their children and grandchildren will live. We should minimize the consumption of plastic, recycle it, clean up after ourselves, and only then will people be able to preserve Mother Nature and the unique monuments that she gave us.