Trash In The Pacific Ocean Essay

1508 Words7 Pages

Our ocean is an amazing place that provides so many necessary things for our survival. Much of the meat that the world eats comes from the ocean. Our oceans are the reason that its easy to ship large amounts of cheap products from China to the United States. Other than that, the ocean is such an awesome place to see strange and even alien creators. It is the place our children dream about. Then why are we killing it and the wondrous animals that live in it? The Pacific oceans gyre is a swirling pile of garbage. The continuous dumping of plastic into the ocean has caused the gyre to increase to be larger than the state of Texas. The article, Sailing to the Pacific Ocean's Trash Vortex, talks about how the North Pacific gyre is not a solid …show more content…

In the article, Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too, Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association, went on record and described the situation in the Atlantic. "Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic." In the Atlantic, this garbage patch spans roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia and sits between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude. Same as the Trash in the Pacific Ocean, the trash in the Atlantic can filter for years, causing damage to marine life and the ocean. In the article, more than 7,000 students have gone off many research cruises were they deployed fine-mesh plankton nets to try and catalog the amount of plastic was caught. It was found that most of the things caught, were in fact plastic. In some places, the student found 520,000 bits of trash per square mile. The current change occasionally, and when they do trash is able to escape the Gyre. When it does, researchers are able to find plastic out in the open ocean, where they weren't expecting it. The Sea Education Association's Proskurowski, when asked to comment on finding trash in the open ocean, they said that "finding plastic so far out in either ocean is sobering because it forces us into a physical confrontation with the human impact on the