Search / 33 posts tagged North Pacific Gyre

It’s hard to imagine the scope and breadth of the Great Garbage Patch that lies in the North Pacific Gyre in the Pacific Ocean between the West Coast and Hawaii. It’s estimated to be about double the size of Texas. Most people think of it as an island of trash, but that’s not accurate.

Long before traveling to Australia for the third International Solar Cities Congress this past February, I knew that water swirls counterclockwise from a sink south of the equator, versus clockwise in Florida (and everywhere in the United States).

Great Pacific Garbage Patch July 23, 2008 I recently learned of a scary mess in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here is the first part in a series that vbs.tv (Vice magazine’s on-line broadcasting network) did on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

It’s one thing to be appalled by the monstrous accumulation of millions of square miles of plastic waste spinning slowly in the North Pacific gyre. It’s another thing entirely to build an ocean-going vessel out of plastic waste and set out across the sea to call attention to the environmental catastrophe.

Sea of Trash By Donavan Hohn, New York Times Off Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and steepen into whitecaps. Quiet with concentration, Chris Pallister decelerates from 15 knots to 8, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel

Because of all the traffic on this post, I wanted to clarify that I am completely convinced that there is lots of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, and that it is a serious environmental problem. My issue with the plastic:plankton ratio is that it doesn’t accurately measure the amount of plastic.

Jocelyn Ford of the the Science Friday blog lives in Beijing, and she has posted an account of the on-the-ground repercussions of China’s plastic bag ban. China banned extremely thin single-use plastic bags, but not the thicker bags more common in the US.

Stealing this pic from perspicio of Today We Choose Faces: (click the pic to read it) To remind us what those who love the scientific process can do:This month heralds a world-changing scientific breakthrough as a teenage prodigy has developed a new way to decompose plastic bags in just three months!

So the trouble with all the news about the North Pacific Trash Gyre — and I do mean all of it — is that it stems from a single source: the Algalita Foundation. Captain Charles Moore and his team have done cruise after cruise, taken all sorts of photographs, and written a lot of reports.

Isn’t it nice when reality follows a TOG discussion on plastic bioremediation? A high school student in Canada may have isolated microbes that degrade plastic bags. As far as I can tell from the not-so-coherent news article, Daniel Burd created a bacteria-friendly environment (warm, wet, and nutritious) and seeded it with ground-up plastic bags.