Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Twice the Size of France!
Posted: April 24th, 2009, 3:53 pm
Ever think that throwing that plastic bag in the ocean doesn't do harm? You might want to re-think that, as ocean dumping is leading to the creation of a floating garbage dumps, including one that's twice the size of France in the Pacific!
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has now been tentatively mapped into an east and west section and the combined weight of plastic there is estimated at three million tons and increasing steadily. It appears to be the big daddy of them all, but we do not know for sure.
Dr Pearn Niiler of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, the world's leading authority on ocean currents, thinks that there is an even bigger garbage patch in the South Pacific, in the vicinity of Easter Island, but no scientists have yet gone to look.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk - Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France