What's that up there, blocking out the sunlight from filtering down into our warm Pacific waters?
The mass known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The sheer quantity of trash and garbage that gets caught up in the current known as the North Pacific Gyro has top researchers and scientists worried.
And even though some of the plastic debris are no larger than a thumb nail, those same little pieces are being eaten up by fish and birds. Those small pieces are interfering with the food chain and will harm more than just marine life.
Needless to say all of that trash it not a pretty sight.
The worst part? This occurrence was predicted. In 1988. Can you believe that? It was a predicted happening, but there was nothing done to prevent it.
But what I would really like to know is... why is there not a picture of it? Surely a mass of garbage in the middle of the Pacific deserves to have a photo shoot, right? I do not think this is a myth, besides the fact that there are numerous articles out there on it, but you would think that someone, somewhere would be allowed to give this gargantuan floating dump some photo time.
I went to google, because you and I know, that is what most people do, and I looked for a good picture of this mass, but all I could find were snap shots of a couple of pieces of trash, not an aerial shot of the whole mass in all its stinking garbage glory.
When I first heard of this, I was just going to check my email and saw an article about it. I was naturally appalled but I knew that it was certainly there. I mean, how often have you seen a garbage bag being blown along a road? Often times those bags end up in the ocean, along with bottles, cans, those little plastic rings that go around soda cans, that you know you are supposed to cut up because of those poor sea turtles that got their necks caught in them, but when people are throwing away their trash, who remembers?
I can recommend a few places to go to read up more on this subject, and this is one of them. http://green.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090804/us_nm/us_ocean_plastics.html
Now I am not certain about how large this thing is, but I have heard that it is the size of Texas, or even twice the size. Either way, that's still huge. And all of that plastic floating around out there, being exposed to the sun, the salt and the water, has turned into this gooey soup that harms more and more sea creatures.
Looks tasty, doesn't it?
All we can hope for is that the scientists who are out there gathering countless amounts of data on this will be able to also figure out how to first stop this thing from growing and second, to reverse this and prevent it from happening again.
