Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (2. Edit. Angela Sun's journey of discovery to one of the most remote places on Earth, Midway Atoll, to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Along the way she encounters scientists, industry, legislators and activists who shed light on what our society's vast consumption of disposable plastic is doing to our oceans, and what it may be doing to our health. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large. What is the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch? A river, sewer or beach can't catch everything the rain washes away, either. In fact, Earth's largest landfill isn't on land at all. It's the poster child for a worldwide problem: plastic that begins in human hands yet ends up in the ocean, often inside animals' stomachs or around their necks. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: A Cross Curricular Water Pollution Inquiry Study (Grades 3-5) ($) Just in time for Earth Day, students can learn about a serious. Angela Sun's journey of discovery to one of the most remote places on Earth, Midway Atoll, to uncover the truth behind the mystery of the Great Pacific. The real Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Photo by Miriam Goldstein, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2010 EX1006 cruise. The amount of plastic trash in the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' has increased 100-fold during the past 40 years, causing 'profound' changes to the marine environment. This marine debris has sloshed into the public spotlight recently, thanks to growing media coverage as well as scientists and explorers who are increasingly visiting the North Pacific to see plastic pollution in action. If only things were that simple. That can make it maddeningly difficult to study . It's these hot spots, not one big mass. Maybe if you added them all up it's the size of Texas, but we still don't know. It could be bigger than Texas. And that's where the problems begin. Sunlight does eventually . The plastic still never goes away; it just becomes microscopic and may be eaten by tiny marine organisms, entering the food chain. Free- floating fishing nets make up another 1. U. N. The rest comes largely from recreational boaters, offshore oil rigs and large cargo ships, which drop about 1. The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean discovered. Great Pacific Garbage Patch. February 29th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan. We’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the past on a few occasions. Scientists and volunteers who have spent the last month gathering data on how much plastic garbage is floating in the Pacific Ocean returned to San. LEGOs. But despite such diversity . The upper part of this gyre, a few hundred miles north of Hawaii, is where warm water from the South Pacific crashes into cooler water from the north. Known as the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, this is also where the trash collects. The whole system collectively makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Plastic can be washed from the interiors of continents to the sea via sewers, streams and rivers, or it might simply wash away from the coast. Either way, it can be a six- or seven- year journey before it's spinning around in the garbage patch. On the other hand, fishing nets and shipping containers often fall right in with the rest of the trash. One of the most famous such debris spills came in 1. The ducks continue to turn up on beaches around the world to this day. Here are the main ones. The nets entangle seals, sea turtles and other animals in a phenomenon known as . With more fishermen from developing countries now using plastic for its low cost and high durability, many abandoned nets can continue fishing on their own for months or years. One of the most controversial types are bottom- set gill nets, which are buoyed by floats and anchored to the sea floor, sometimes stretching for thousands of feet. In addition to being entangled by fishing nets, they often swallow plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, their main prey. They can also get caught up in a variety of other objects, such as this snapping turtle that grew up constricted by a plastic ring around its body. Being so small and plentiful, they can easily get lost along the way, washing through the watershed with other plastics and into the sea. They tend to float there and eventually photodegrade, but that takes many years. In the meantime, they wreak havoc with sea birds such as the short- tailed albatross. These are small dots bobbing just below the surface, and look unfortunately similar to resin pellets. Well- meaning albatrosses scoop up these pellets . Decaying albatross chicks are frequently found with stomachs full of plastic debris (see photo above). This is bad for a couple of reasons. First, Bamford says, is plastic's . Plastic has also been shown to absorb pre- existing organic pollutants like PCBs from the surrounding seawater, which can enter the food chain . Charles Moore, once said a cleanup effort . Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography held a press conference after returning from their three- week voyage in 2. We need to educate people on the proper disposal of things that do not break up, like plastics. As a society, we have to get better at reusing what we buy.
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