The Plastic Ocean

Video Source: Ocean Garbage from CBC (2011)

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Image Courtesy: NOAA Marine Debris Program

In case you didn't have time to watch the informative video about the ocean garbage patch, this is a quick summary on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, famously described as the floating "island of trash"; as large as twice of Texas.

A gyre is a large circular feature composed of ocean currents spiralling around a center point. Among the five major subtropical oceanic gyres, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is the one most striking due to its tendency to accumulate debris. Scientists call this the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Four ocean currents form its boundaries: North Pacific Current, California Current, North Equatorial Current, and the Kuroshio Current, rotating in a clockwise direction.

In fact, there is no floating island that people could visit and spend their vacation on. In its place, monstrous quantities of plastic fragments lurks beneath the water's surface.

Midway Atoll

Right smacked in the center of the gyre lies the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands; Midway Atoll, acting as a filter in the North Pacific, thereby accumulating drifting fishing nets, colourful plastic fragments among all the other kinds of plastic waste on its shores.

Midway is home to robust flora and fauna, however it remains endangered to plastic waste. Every year, an estimated 5000 Kilograms of plastic are brought to Midway in the stomachs of birds.

Seabirds; notably albatrosses, are more prone to ingesting plastic as they fish via skimming their beaks across the top of water. The albatrosses return to their nesting colonies located at Midway, and inadvertently feed their chicks a plastic diet - lighters, bottle caps etc. The Laysan Albatross chicks are not able to regurgitate like their parents. Once consumed, plastic debris cause starvation, stomach rupture, and suffocation, leaving many carcasses of these chicks strewn across the island.

The accumulation of plastic trash also threatens the endangered monk seals and Hawaiian green sea turtles that forage in the atoll's shallow waters, leaving them entangled in fishing nets and ingested with plastic debris.

When this albatross died, it had 558 individual pieces of plastic stuffed into its stomach. [Image Courtesy: Eric Dale]

558 individual pieces of plastic found stuffed in the stomach of this dead albatross stomach. [Image Courtesy: Eric Dale]

Hawaiian Monk Seal ensnared in plastic net. [Image Courtesy: Sites at Penn State]

MARINE Wildlife

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PLASTIC TRASH

Trash is dangerous to a range of marine animals that rely on the ocean ecosystem. More than 4400 entangled animals, including sea turtles, porpoises and seabirds were recorded during coastal clean-up efforts by Ocean Conservancy.

fishing nets and lines are primary culprits of ingestion-related mortality, followed by plastic bags and small plastic products (bottle caps).

Out of Sight may mean Out of Mind, but definitely not Out of the Ocean.

Plastic pollution is personal.

It is not an ocean problem, but a people problem.

Every decision we make play a part in the well-being of our Ocean.