Ocean of Garbage
community, conservation, environmental monitoring, water January 15th, 2008
Are you aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? This collection of mostly plastic garbage is circulating in the North Pacific roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of the United States. There’s a pattern of ocean currents that traps and collects the detritus, and this garbage patch covers approximately ten million square miles and it’s growing.
Much of the waste is collected from our cities by storm water and washed to sea. While cities are now installing catch basins to corral this material (the image is of Los Angeles), the problem still continues.
Learning about this phenomenon really opened my eyes to the many ecological problems that our oceans face. There’s a fantastic multimedia web offering from the Los Angeles times called Altered Oceans that’s definitely worth viewing. Part 4 of this series deals specifically with plastic waste.
Posts
January 15th, 2008 at 10:30 am
How about a KML file for location?
Thanks
January 15th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Good point. Here’s a placemark for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for access in Google Earth. It’s stated that the area is twice the size of Texas, and seeing on a map is believing.
bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/placemarks/ 1042947-ThedomainoftheGreatPacificGarbagePatch.kmz
January 15th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Thank you very much!
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
[...] blogged earlier about the “Ocean of Garbage.” Today, Jeff sent me a link to a Greenpeace animation that shows ocean currents and the [...]
February 25th, 2009 at 10:27 am
[...] posted before about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and once you’re aware of it, it’s something [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
When I arived in Santa Barbara, Ca. in early 60’s, there was a chap who rigged a Higgins boat with collecting tools in order to harvest local sea-wead. He did well that for quite some time, but I ignore what happened to him. Similarly, a flotilla of harvesters could be based in a bigger mother ship and be out lifting nasty plastic content of ocean, bringing it in to the mother ship, similarly to those Cod fish sailors who would work in the Canadian NorthEast waters and return to the mother ship with their catch, at times days later. You probably saw the film with the Portuguese four mast sailboat from late 50’s, right? Mutatis mutandis your catch would be something else…