From Charles Moore's Journey To The Pacific

It’s a bright and sunny day on the coast of California, there is a nice cool breeze flowing through the palm trees that sit behind you. Sitting in a beach chair near the water, close enough to let the tide water come up and caress your feet, enjoying a nice refreshing beverage, you suddenly feel a gentle tap on your ankle. Looking around down by your feet you realize that your almost empty sunscreen bottle was sitting to close to the water and the tide has picked it up. You hurry to run after your bottle but it’s too late it was sucked underneath the water, never to be seen by your eyes again. As you sit there you begin to wonder where that bottle will wind up, maybe it will somehow land on the coast of Hawaii or perhaps maybe even Japan. So

Moore was sailing through the pacific when he realized that something was around him, something not of nature but of man. Moore stated, “It’s just that I couldn’t survey the surface of the ocean for any period of time while standing on deck without seeing some anthropogenic debris, something that was human in origin, float by. Not necessarily a large something, but just something” (Greenberg). The “something” that he found was broken down bits of plastic that had gone through a gyre. In the Pacific Ocean a gyre is wind and currents that circulate the water in a clockwise motion. This motion makes a whirlpool, in effect the trash is swallowed by these whirlpools and then broken into smaller and smaller pieces (“What is The Gyre”). This means that the sunscreen bottle made of plastic that got caught in the water and brought out to sea will be in for the ride of its life. You shouldn’t feel bad however because one bottle doesn’t even make a fraction of all the trash particles that are floating around in the pacific. In fact “by estimation 80% of the plastic originates from land; floating in rivers to the ocean or blew by the wind into the ocean” (“Facts”). That means that what we do on land greatly effects the water that surrounds our

The first part is the Western garbage patch near the coast of japan. This patch is formed by what is known as the Kuroshio Current. The second part is named the Eastern Garbage patch and is found off the coast of California. This patch is formed by the California Current. The reason that these two patches are not considered two smaller patches is because they are interconnected by a large Subtropical Convergent Zone and the North Equatorial, these two current systems help move the debris from the west to the east and from the east to the west and will just continue to rotate in a giant clockwise formation. According to the Environmental cleanup coalition, “Currently, an estimated 11 million tons (and growing) of floating plastic covers an area of nearly 5 million square miles in the Pacific Ocean, 700 miles northeast of the Hawaiian Island chain and 1,000 miles from the coast of California.” Plastic will float in the ocean until it is either washed on surface from strong winds that blow across the water or eaten by fish or perhaps cleaned