August 25, 2009
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Somewhere, in the middle of the most deserted place on Earth is the world's largest garbage dump. Hundreds of miles from even the nearest land, a current known as the Great Pacific Gyre naturally swirls and whirls in a vast circular motion. For millenia, this has caused a natural feeding ground to form that supports a great diversity of marine life, including the great albatross and massive sea turtles.
However, if you were to fly over this part of the ocean today, you'd still find all those animals, but they'd be floating on and in a massive pile of trash, tens of miles across. The same currents that collect phytoplankton and zoo plankton have gathered items that have spilled from ships bringing recyclables to port and others that are bringing the raw materials back across the ocean for remanufacture. All this plastic is broken down by the sun into smaller and smaller pieces that many animals mistake for food, filling up on it to the point where they can no longer actually digest real food.
Filed under Recycle by admin
