Pacific garbage patch Patch#

Moreover, the patch shifts from west to east and north to south, based on seasonal changes in winds and currents. On average, it is noted that this huge patch moves around 35°N to 42°N and 135°W to 155°W.

However, due to changing ocean currents and winds, the shape and location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are always changing. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. Where is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch located? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also called the Pacific Trash Vortex, is the largest of the five ocean garbage patches on Earth. It is, however, now used as a perfect example of catastrophic marine pollution (i.e., of debris accumulation in the oceans and seas). Unfortunately, this situation has come to media attention only in the past couple of decades. This great accumulation of marine debris has been a threat to our marine lives for years. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”Ĭharles Moore alerted the oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer who proceeded to officially call it the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. He wrote of this discovery: “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. Moore (an oceanographer and boat captain) as he was returning home from the Transpacific sailing race in 1997 when he came across this huge patch of garbage while going through the North Pacific Gyre. They also found that concentrations of neuston were in the same proportions as the garbage.The term “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” was coined by Charles J.

In studying the samples, the researchers found that as with the Atlantic Gyre, large numbers of neuston in the NPGP were concentrated near its center. Specimens in the samples were identified and counted as were garbage samples. In all the team collected 22 samples, 12 from inside the central gyre and 10 from outside, for comparison purposes. The team also attached a General Oceanics Mechanical Flowmeter to the trawl to measure the volume of water in which the specimens were found. As the ship sailed, a trawling device was dragged along behind to capture living creatures. The route taken by the I Am Ocean sailing vessel, was plotted using a numerical drift model-the team wanted to see what sorts of creatures were living among the densest parts of the garbage in the patch. The work by the team was called the Vortex Swim-a sailing expedition in the NPGP that lasted for 80 days. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if there were similar numbers of neuston in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which has over time come to be called the North Pacific garbage patch (NPGP) due to the large amount of human garbage floating in its center. Because the spinning is in the form of a vortex, material at the outer edge is pulled toward the center, which is why neuston and garbage tend to coalesce in them. Neuston is a term that has been coined to refer to floating lifeforms on the sea surface, and a gyre is a spiral or vortex, where water turns like clouds in a hurricane only much more slowly. Prior research has shown that there is an abundance of neuston in the Subtropical North Atlantic Gyre, which forms the Sargasso Sea-parts of which have been labeled the North Atlantic garbage patch, due to the huge amounts of human garbage that has accumulated there.