A giant trash island in the Pacific Ocean. Great Garbage Island

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, as they call this giant island of garbage, 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. Made it easier until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic takes more than a hundred years to decompose. 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.

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 at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said: “Initially people assumed it was an island of plastic waste that you could almost walk on. 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 young playboy and 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 in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.

In general, they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island; fragments of plastic float in the water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that gets here sinks to the bottom layers, so we don’t even know exactly 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.

The North Pacific Gyre is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no one's.

The slowly circulating mass of water, replete with debris, poses a danger 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.

“This is the so-called Great Garbage Island, located in the Pacific Ocean. The area reaches up to 1.8 million square kilometers. None of the environmentalists are interested in it; three eccentrics are “saving” the Earth from a giant landfill (some of them have official certificates from a psychiatrist) - Charles Moore, Thor Heyerdahl's grandson Olav and David Rothschild (he also has a certificate)."

“In the vastness of the great ocean, the North Pacific subtropical whirlpool is known - a large-scale and slow current, twisting clockwise, caused by changes in air pressure and temperature. This area is a kind of desert in the ocean, filled with plant plankton, but extremely poor in large fish or mammals "Permanent calms and the absence of game animals do not at all attract shipping here: rarely does any vessel cross these edges. And besides plankton, only garbage is found here. Millions of tons of garbage are the colossal landfill on our planet, slowly drifting across the expanses of the Pacific Ocean."

"The currents of the eddy created two garbage formations known as the Eastern and Western Pacific Garbage Patch - and together they are sometimes called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Patch is located between the Hawaiian Islands and California, and is an area twice the size of Texas. The Western Landfill is located east of "Japan. But don't think that only the Hawaiians or the Japanese are to blame: the great Pacific garbage is collected by almost all of humanity. Subtropical current zones extend over 6 thousand km and accumulate garbage collected from all over the Pacific Ocean."

All garbage floating on the surface of the world's oceans consists of 90% plastic.

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“Environmentalists, of course, are not sitting idle - there are even special funds whose goal is to clean up and dispose of ocean garbage. The history of their appearance is quite interesting:

14 years ago, a young playboy and 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 in the ocean.

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 with the proceeds founded the environmental organization 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 have awaited the current AMRF report, 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 that the son of the 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. Last week, AMRF's founder warned that unless consumers limit their use of non-recyclable plastic, the surface area of ​​the "garbage soup" will double in the next 10 years and threaten not only Hawaii, but the entire Pacific Rim.

“But in general, they try to “ignore” the problem. A 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 percent of all The plastic that gets here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can’t even imagine exactly how much trash can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies right under the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from a satellite. Rubbish can only be seen from the nose ship - or by diving into the water with scuba gear."

Moore was able to connect only the eccentric David de Rothschild (a representative of “that same” dynasty, he is below against the background of empty plastic bottles), and Thor Heyerdahl’s grandson Olav.

“Out of his 32 years, David has been seeing a psychiatrist for 17 years, but this did not stop him from crossing the entire Arctic on foot through the North Pole and living for a year among the Indians of Ecuador. Rothschild lives most of the time on his eco-farm in New Zealand, and only 3-4 times a day has been coming to London to visit his doctor for a year."

“Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific Eddy is extremely poor in life. There are no large commercial fish, no mammals, no birds. No one except colonies of zooplankton.”

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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 at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said yesterday: "People initially thought it was an island of plastic waste that you could almost walk on. This idea is inaccurate. The consistency of the slick is very similar to soup made of plastic. It's just endless - perhaps twice the size of the continental United States."

The main ocean polluters are China and India. Here it is considered common practice to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water.

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Will a new continent ever be built on a plastic foundation?

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 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.

The area of ​​the garbage patch in the 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.

Clogging of water bodies with human waste is one of the pressing problems of our time. Some of the garbage decomposes over time, but a considerable amount of it settles to the bottom or remains floating on the water surface, causing enormous damage to the environment.

Huge accumulations of garbage, resembling islands or even entire continents in size, are often found in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. Researchers of this phenomenon compare it to a “garbage soup”: some of the waste does not sink, but floats on the surface or in the water column – and such “spots” of garbage stretch for many kilometers.

Where does such a large amount of human waste come from in the ocean?

First of all, this is what is thrown into the water by residents and guests of cities located in close proximity to the seas.

For example, environmentalists call India, Thailand and China the leaders in polluting water with garbage, where dumping everything unnecessary into rivers and seas is considered practically the norm.

Tourists vacationing on warm sea coasts around the world usually litter especially actively and thoughtlessly. They release cigarette butts, plastic bottles and cans from various drinks, glasses, corks, plastic bags, disposable tableware, cocktail straws and other household waste into the water.

But that's not all. Let's remember school lessons. Rivers flow into the seas, the seas are part of the oceanic waters, which make up more than 95% of the entire water shell of the Earth - the hydrosphere. Thus, most of the garbage thrown into rivers, carried by currents, will also end up in the ocean.

According to scientists, about 80% of the volume of this gigantic water dump comes from the ground. And only the remaining 20% ​​is the waste of “marine” human activity:

• torn fishing nets;
• waste from floating oil drilling rigs;
• garbage that is thrown from ships, etc.

All this rubbish that ends up in the ocean floats with the current and finally accumulates in certain “quiet” places, where it forms entire “floating landfills” on the waves.

Pacific Garbage Gutter

The world's largest water dump is located in the North Pacific Ocean. It is there that ocean currents form a kind of funnel into which debris is pulled.

The result is a real “dead sea” of rotting waste, marine flora, corpses of aquatic inhabitants, and shipwrecks. And since the mid-twentieth century, floating remains of plastic have rapidly begun to accumulate here, which naturally decomposes over several hundred years.

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, “Garbage Iceberg” - as they call this huge accumulation of floating waste and garbage, located between Hawaii and California, in the media.

The exact dimensions are still not known. According to rough estimates, its weight can be more than 3.5 million tons with an occupied area of ​​10 million square kilometers or more.

According to its structure, the “garbage iceberg” is divided into two large parts - Western (closer to the shores of Japan and China) and Eastern (near California and Hawaii).

Facts about Garbage Island in the Pacific Ocean:

1. Even before its actual discovery, its existence was announced in 1988 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Such conclusions were made by scientists based on observations of the oceans, the movement of waste accumulations in them, as well as the nature of currents.
2. The “garbage channel” was officially discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore: while traveling on a yacht, he found himself in a part of the body of water covered for many miles with garbage floating on the surface. The discovery amazed Moore so much that he wrote several articles about it, which attracted the attention of the whole world to the problem. He subsequently became the founder of an environmental organization for ocean research.
3. About 70% of waste sinks, so the so-called “garbage soup”, which occupies a huge area on the surface of the water, is only one third of the total volume of the “world’s water dump”.
4. Plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds and aquatic mammals every year.
5. There are forecasts that promise a doubling of the scale of the “continent of waste” in just ten years if humanity does not reduce the volume of plastic products consumed (and thrown away).

The production of plastic products in the world is still growing steadily every year. Accordingly, an increasing amount of it ends up in natural reservoirs.

For details about the Pacific Garbage Gutter, watch the video:

The dangers and consequences of ocean water pollution

The damage that garbage islands cause to the environment, and ultimately to the lives and health of people themselves, is simply colossal:

1. In vast areas of the ocean, sunlight does not penetrate through the waste-polluted water columns. As a result, algae and plankton die in these areas, which in turn provide food for the inhabitants of the depths. Lack of nutrition can lead to their extinction and further complete disappearance.
2. The bulk of garbage is all kinds of plastic. The period of its complete natural decomposition in the natural environment, according to ecologists, can range from 100 to 500 years. That is, at the moment this entire mass is not decreasing, but is only increasing due to daily new arrivals.
3. When exposed to the sun, plastic gradually breaks down into small granules that can absorb toxins from the environment, turning into real poison.
4. Plastic particles are consumed by animals as food. This happens because its pieces are overgrown with algae, and the small granules look like eggs and the same plankton. Often, plastic eaten by birds and fish causes their death. Even if the animal survives, in any case it receives chronic poisoning with harmful substances that cause diseases and mutations.
5. The waste covering the bottom of the oceans destroys the habitat of the inhabitants of the deep.

The laws of the food chain are inexorable and fair: as a result, poisons from plastic inevitably affect commercial fish species, and through them cause harm to human health.

Note! Ocean Trash Facts:

• scientists believe that by 2050, plastic will be ingested by almost all birds and marine life without exception;
• about 40% of albatrosses die precisely because of pecking on plastic as food;
• about 9% of fish have plastic residues in their stomachs, and according to scientists, in general, fish eat up to 20 tons of waste polymers per year.

If you combine all the “garbage spots” into one, you will get an area larger than the United States of America. And so far, every year this “water dump” only expands its borders.

How to deal with the problem?

It would seem obvious that the problem of waste in the seas and oceans needs to be solved by the whole world and as soon as possible! But so far no one is actually doing this. Garbage accumulates in international waters, and none of the countries wants to take responsibility, and most importantly, bear the financial costs associated with solving this problem.

But it is worth noting that these expenses are unlikely to be within the budget of one, even a developed, country - the amount of garbage accumulated in the oceans is too large.

The solution proposed by environmentalists may sound categorical, but reasonable. In their opinion, humanity as a whole needs to, if not completely abandon plastic and polyethylene, then at least reduce its production and consumption to the bare minimum.

Also a serious step in solving the problem is the need for environmentally friendly recycling of plastic waste.

Important! Of course, each of us individually is not able to solve the problem of plastic pollution in full, but each of us can make our personal contribution to the protection of natural resources:

• reduce the amount of plastic and polyethylene used, giving preference to containers and packaging made from natural materials: fabric and paper bags and bags, wooden and cardboard boxes, etc.;
• Under no circumstances should you throw items made of any type of plastic into water, on the ground, or even into the general mass of garbage, but store them in special containers marked “for plastic” or take them to recycling collection points for subsequent processing and disposal.

Will people listen to the calls of environmentalists, or is humanity destined to perish from the waste of its own life and its own frivolity? So far, the problem of “garbage spots” on the Earth’s waters remains as acute as it was five and ten years ago. Individual attempts by enthusiasts to deal with garbage in the ocean are just a drop in the bucket; solving this problem requires enormous funds and considerable effort.