I picked up my beloved PEOPLE magazine yesterday, hoping for some entertaining celebrity news and read an article that shocked me. Call me a naive Green Living blogger, but I have never heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
If that term is unfamiliar to you, let me clue you in. In central North Pacific Ocean, there is a huge mass of marine litter. And by huge, I mean this thing is twice the size of Texas! This mass of trash, made up of mostly old toys, plastic bottles, bags, etc. washed off beaches, is so large, it has often been jokingly referred to as the eighth continent.
All this garbage collects in this area due to the currents of the North Pacific Gyre, which swirls the garbage together. However, it does move, so it has been hard to track in the past and, believe it or not, it cannot be photographed via satellite because most of the garbage is either suspended at the surface of the ocean or slightly beneath it.
Scientists have known about this continent of trash for over a decade, but thought the possibility of cleaning it up was impossible. Now, there is Project Kaisei, which is an effort by a group of researchers to study the mass in order to determine if it is possible to clean up. The project was created by the Ocean Voyages Institute, a not-for-profit organization focused on marine preservation.
This past August, the vessels New Horizon and Kaisei were dispatched on a 30 day expedition. Researchers hope to gather up to 40 tons of debris for testing to see if it can be recycled into new products such as diesel fuel or clothing. If this is possible, the Kaisei and other commercial cleanup vessels would then launch on a massive clean up effort.
The cool part is the project is being filmed, so we can see not only the damage done by the trash, but also the clean up efforts, which if successful, will be incredible.
(This image of the Hawaiian Island of Niihau is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
