The Great Pacific garbage patch (English Eastern Garbage Patch - Eastern garbage continent, or Pacific Trash Vortex - Pacific "garbage dump") - a giant accumulation of man-made garbage in the North Pacific Ocean, where deposits of plastic and other waste brought by the waters of the North Pacific system are concentrated currents. Rough estimates of the area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million square meters. km and more, (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of the Pacific Ocean). There are probably over one hundred million tons of garbage in this area.
It has also been suggested that the garbage continent consists of two combined areas. According to scientists, about 80% of the garbage comes from land-based sources (the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North America), 20% is thrown from the decks of ships in the open sea.
The concentration of small plastic particles in the upper layers of the garbage continent is one of the highest in the World Ocean. Unlike biodegradable waste, plastic under the influence of light only breaks down into small particles, while maintaining the polymer structure.
More and more small particles are concentrated in the surface layer of the ocean, and as a result, marine organisms living here begin to eat them, confusing them with plankton. Large amounts of durable plastic end up in the stomachs of seabirds and animals, in particular sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.
The remains of a nestling of a dark-backed (Laysan) albatross, to which the parents fed plastic; the chick could not remove it from the body, which led to death, either from hunger, or from suffocation.
Promotional video:
On the right is a turtle that got caught in a plastic ring as a child and grew up in it:
In addition to directly harming animals, floating waste can absorb organic pollutants from water, including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloromethylmethane), and PAHs (polyaromatic hydrocarbons). Some of these substances are not only toxic - their structure is similar to the hormone estradiol, which leads to hormonal disruption in a poisoned animal. Ultimately, toxic substances can enter the body of a person who has eaten poisoned fish.
In addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there are four other giant debris accumulations in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, each of which, together with the Great Pacific Garbage, corresponds to one of the five major ocean current systems.
Maldives! Heaven on earth, isn't it? Who would have thought that the photo below is also the Maldives.
I will tell you about the famous garbage island in the Pacific Ocean below, but it is hard to imagine that a similar island, only in the direct sense of the word, is located in the very center of a paradise called the Maldives. The tourism industry here is one of the most developed in the world, so it is not surprising that a lot of garbage is generated. And how do you think the Maldives government has solved this problem? Garbage is simply taken out to a separate island - Tilafushi.
And maybe no one would have known about this, if not for the news that the removal of garbage to this island was suspended, since a huge amount of it accumulated there, and pollution of the ocean began. Waste spills into the water and replenishes the famous dump of the Pacific Garbage Island
Even more interesting, this artificial island called Tilafushi is located just 7 kilometers from the capital of the Maldives. But this is not a resort at all, there is no snow-white sand and clear water - instead, you can see only mountains of garbage.
The main suppliers of waste stored here are luxury hotels. Local residents are rummaging through the trash heaps trying to find something edible or sellable. And over the island there is often a cloud of dirty smog. Now the government is trying to take measures to remove and dispose of excess garbage. What will it be? Perhaps they will find some new suitable island.
In general, the rules require the delivery of garbage in a sorted form for further processing, but hotels simply unload it in a common heap, and unscrupulous boatmen, who are too lazy to wait several hours in line to dump garbage, simply throw it into the water. The garbage that nevertheless ends up on the island is burned directly in the open air, but it still does not come out to burn and recycle.
Over the years, the authorities' promises to build a waste recycling plant here have remained promises, and now the problem of environmental pollution is more acute than ever.
And now about the now famous Pacific garbage island.
“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “North Pacific Gyre”, “Pacific Garbage Patch”, as one does not call this giant island of garbage, which is growing at a gigantic pace. They have been talking about the garbage island for more than half a century, but practically no action has been taken. In the meantime, irreparable damage to the environment is caused, whole species of animals are dying out. Chances are high that the moment will come when nothing can be fixed … So, read more about the problem of ocean pollution below.
Pollution dates back to the days when plastic was invented. On the one hand, an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It made it easier until the plastic product was thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to the ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island larger than the US state of Texas floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, daily ~ 2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris are dumped into the ocean from all continents. By decomposing slowly, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean kills over a million seabirds every year, as well as over 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - all these objects are swallowed by birds, mistaking them for food.
Garbage Island has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific Current System, the center of which, where all the garbage gets, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, at present, the mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and the area is more than a million square kilometers. The "Island" has a number of unofficial names: "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", "Eastern Garbage Patch", "Pacific Trash Vortex", etc. In Russian it is sometimes called also "trash iceberg". In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island zone by six times.
This huge pile of floating debris - in fact, the planet's greatest dump - is held in one place under the influence of currents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the North Pacific Ocean, past Hawaii, and almost reaches distant Japan.
American oceanographer Charles Moore - the discoverer of this "great Pacific garbage patch", also known as "the dump cycle", believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Markus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA) founded by Moore, said yesterday: “Initially, people assumed that this was an island of plastic trash that you could almost walk on. This view is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It is simply endless - perhaps twice the area of the continental United States. " The story of the discovery of the trash spot by Moore is quite interesting: 14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to take a break in Hawaii after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had swum into the trash.
Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and with the proceeds founded the environmental organization Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often dismissed as not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would await the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped the environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic waste onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say that the son of the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who went to shoot a new film in Hawaii, almost got a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic ruined not only the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, Moore's name has not left the pages of the American media. Last week, the AMRF founder warned that unless consumers restrict the use of plastic that is not recyclable, the surface area of the trash soup will double in the next 10 years and threaten not only Hawaii, but all the Pacific Rim countries.
But in general, they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill is not like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a "soup" - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that gets here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can't even imagine exactly how much trash can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the "plastic sea" cannot be seen from the satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of the ship or by diving into the water. But ships are rarely in this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains laid routes away from this part of the Pacific Ocean, known for the fact that there is never any wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Maelstrom is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no man's.
Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has monitored the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for over 15 years. He compares the cesspool with a living creature: "It moves around the planet like a large animal, released from a leash." When this animal approaches land - and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago, this is the case - the results are quite dramatic. “As soon as a garbage spot burps, the whole beach is covered with this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.
According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, teeming with garbage, poses a threat to human health. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting like chemical sponges, attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs with food. “What gets into the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean dwellers, and then on your plate. Everything is very simple.
China and India are the main ocean pollutants. It is considered in the order of things here to throw garbage directly into the nearby water body. Below is a photo that makes no sense to comment..
There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical whirlpool formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade winds and inter-trade countercurrents. The North Pacific whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where for centuries the most diverse rubbish has been demolished from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, shipwrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of decaying mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, therefore the North Pacific whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, no mammals, or birds. None other than zooplankton colonies. Therefore, fishing vessels do not enter here either, even military and merchant ships try to bypass this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.
Since the beginning of the 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly biodegradable and do not go anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, with a total weight of six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of all garbage spots exceeds even the territory of the United States! Every 10 years the area of this colossal dump is increasing by an order of magnitude.
A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. There used to be legends about the island of wreckage of ships and masts, which drifts in those waters, now wooden wreckage has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we meet the most real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced annually in the world and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing faster and faster every year. And only you and I can stop their growth by abandoning plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made of biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to at least buy juice and water in glass containers or tetra-packs. A bright future for the world's oceans:
But there are also garbage cities on the planet!
Menshit Nasser is a trash community in Egypt, where trash from all major cities flows. People actually live here and dig tunnels for themselves in search of something that could be resold. They actually resell about 80% of all rubbish.