The Great Garbage Patch

The great garbage patch, also called the Pacific garbage patch, is a large-scale system of rotating marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The garbage patch has received a lot of attention from the news media recently due to several related stories released in the last few months. First, large patches of debris in the Atlantic Ocean were originally thought to have been from the missing Air France plane that crashed in June, but ended up being part of an Atlantic Ocean garbage patch. The confusion drew attention to the even larger Pacific garbage patch. More recently, in August, a group of students and researchers collected samples of plastic floating in the North Pacific Ocean during a three-week expedition. Several news organizations covered the expedition including LA Times and Associated Press. The research team, SEAPLEX (Seeking the Science of the Garbage Patch) has their own blog and website that should keep us posted as the team begins to analyze their data. Drawing further news coverage to the garbage patch, a research study was released in August that reports that plastic breaks down in the ocean much faster than we originally thought. This means that not only do we need to worry about the plastic (and garbage) that we see in the ocean, but also the plastic we can't see. If we include tiny bits of dissolved plastic, the garbage patch might be even larger than has been predicted. The study was was covered by BBC News and was featured in an Op-Ed in the New York Times.

The existence of the garbage patch was first predicted in 1988 after scientists found large amounts of garbage circulating in the Pacific Ocean. Their results suggested that similar patches of garbage could be found in other parts of the Ocean with similar currents. Although the size of this debris is estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the exact size is unknown. We'll have to keep an eye on the SEAPLEX research team's analysis to see if they are able to develop a better estimate of the garbage patch's size and whether that estimate will take into account tiny, dissolved bits of plastic.