By Cliff Montgomery – Apr. 29th, 2018
A few weeks ago, the corporate media spent a small amount of time informing the public that a large conglomeration of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California is rapidly growing.
What many of the outlets failed to mention is that this area, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” is about 16 times larger than previously thought.
The Garbage Patch now has been estimated to contain a whopping 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, sprawls over an area of 1.6 million square kilometers (which means it covers an area almost 2.5 times larger than that of modern France) and is thought to weigh around 80,000 metric tons.
These conclusions were the results of a three-year study of the Garbage Patch “by an international team of scientists affiliated with The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, six universities and an aerial sensor company,” according to Science Daily.
The team’s findings have been published in the periodical Scientific Reports.
And this huge mass of plastic is not the only one of its kind: the Great Patch is only “the largest of five major offshore waste accumulation zones that result from converging ocean currents,” according to the Independent, the well-known British newspaper.
“Overall you would expect [that] plastic pollution is getting worse in the oceans because we are producing and using more plastics, globally and annually,” Dr. Laurent Lebreton, a scientist affiliated with the study, told the Independent.
Plastic items make up 99 per cent of the Great Patch, according to the researchers.
Perhaps most surprising, the researchers found that a whopping 92% of those plastic items are larger objects, while microplastics – very small plastic fragments below five millimeters in length – constitute a mere 8% of the patch.
“We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,” Dr. Julia Reisser, Chief Scientist of the study, told reporters.
“We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments,” continued Dr. Reisser, “but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris.”
The institutions involved in the research hope that their study may provide a more coherent notion of what plastics actually constitute the Great Patch, and the methods that might be used to remove the massive amounts of debris from the area.
“In order to solve a problem, you really first have to understand the problem,” Boyan Slat, CEO of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, told reporters.
Though studies had been made of the Great Patch since the 1970s, those investigations employed only small nets to collect samples from the area.
“We had this hunch there was this measurement bias towards the smaller pieces, because of the way we have been sampling in the past,” Slat told the Independent.
The new findings suggest that we need more proper examinations of the plastics which form the Great Patch and similar areas before we attempt to clean up those polluted areas, according to the researchers.
“We don’t really have an idea of where and how much plastic there is” in the ocean, Dr. Lebreton told the Independent, “so I hope the new techniques we introduce here will be used in other parts of the world.”
