May 02 2009

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Published by at 2:46 pm under Environment,Oceans

I’ve written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific. There’s some much plastic there, that plastic outnumber plankton. Here’s an excellent infographic showing how big it is (the size of Texas), how it was created and how it’s sustained. Ocean currents from all over the Pacific push plastic dumped into waterways and off boats into the North Pacific Gyre (home of the great Pacific Garbage Patch). I was shocked when traveling to remote island in Indonesia to see their beaches covered in plastic debris.

There’s now talk of an Atlantic Garbage Patch and concern that marine fish and mammals are consuming much of the plastic (story on National Geographic).

If you’re looking for a good reason to cut down on plastic consumption, here’s an excellent one. Link to larger graphic on Flickr. Share this!

great pacific garbage patch The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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4 responses so far

  • http://www.projectkaisei.org/index.html Dennis

    Check out this effort to bring attention and solutions to the issue. The first voyage leaves Sausailito in just over a month http://www.projectkaisei.org.

  • http://www.ecopirates.net/blog/2009/12/30/garbage-all-over/ garbage all over « ecopirates.net

    [...] surftherenow.com Tagged as: aware, ecology, habitat, whatcanIdo Leave a comment Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post ) [...]

  • http://ecocoupons.org Eric

    Thank you for bringing attention to this pressing issue. We also featured an article about the ned to fix this issue on our blog at: http://ecocoupons.org/blog/environmental-news/the-sea-series…rs-zooplankton.html

  • http://erpz.net/2010/04/25/the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/ The Great Pacific Garbage Patch « ERPZ

    [...] will not go into details of how the trash remains stuck in the ocean, but these two sites surftherenow.com and mindfully.org have some informational graphics that describe the situation. Mindfully.org has [...]