home › Chassis › Where does trash in the ocean come from and how to deal with it. Garbage spot in the Pacific Ocean: where is the lie and where is the truth The largest island made of garbage

Where does trash in the ocean come from and how to deal with it. Garbage spot in the Pacific Ocean: where is the lie and where is the truth The largest island made of garbage

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge accumulation of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean. The slick is made up of plastic and other man-made waste that was picked up by a gyre current in the North Pacific Ocean. Despite its size and significant density, the spot is not visible on satellite photographs because it consists of small particles. In addition, most of the garbage floats in a slightly submerged state, hiding under water.

The existence of a garbage continent was theoretically predicted back in 1988. The forecast was based on data collected in Alaska between 1985 and 1988. A study of the amount of drifting plastic in the surface waters of the North Pacific Ocean found that a lot of debris accumulates in areas subject to certain ocean currents. Data from the Sea of Japan led the researchers to speculate that similar accumulations could be found in other parts of the Pacific Ocean, where prevailing currents contribute to the formation of relatively calm water surfaces. In particular, scientists pointed to the North Pacific Current System. A few years later, the existence of a huge garbage patch was documented by Charles Moore, a Californian captain and marine explorer. While sailing through the North Pacific Current system after participating in a regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the ocean surface. Captain Moore reported his discovery to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who subsequently named the area the Eastern Garbage Continent. The existence of a garbage patch attracted the attention of the public and scientific circles after the publication of several articles by Charles Moore. Since then, the Great Garbage Patch has been considered the largest example of human pollution in the marine environment.

Like other areas of the world's oceans with high levels of trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was formed by ocean currents that gradually concentrated trash thrown into the ocean into one area. The Garbage Patch occupies a large, relatively stable area in the northern Pacific Ocean, bounded by the North Pacific Current System (an area often referred to as the "horse latitudes", or calm latitudes). The system's vortex collects debris from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters of North America and Japan. The waste is picked up by surface currents and gradually moves to the center of the whirlpool, which does not release the waste beyond its boundaries.

The exact size of the large spot is unknown. It is impossible to estimate its size from aboard a ship, and the spot is not visible from an airplane. We can glean most of the information about the garbage patch only from theoretical calculations. Estimates of its area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of the Pacific Ocean). There are probably over one hundred million tons of trash in this area. It is also suggested that the garbage continent consists of two combined areas.

According to Charles Moore's calculations, 80% of the debris in the slick comes from land-based sources, and 20% is thrown from the decks of ships on the high seas. Moore says waste from the east coast of Asia travels to the center of the vortex in about five years, and from the west coast of North America in a year or less.

A garbage patch is not a continuous layer of debris floating on the surface itself. Degraded plastic particles are mostly too small to be seen visually. To roughly estimate the density of pollution, scientists examine water samples. In 2001, scientists (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the garbage patch, the concentration of plastic was already reaching a million particles per square mile. There were 3.34 pieces of plastic per square meter with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams. In many places in the contaminated region, the total concentration of plastic was seven times higher than the concentration of zooplankton. In samples taken at greater depths, the level of plastic waste was found to be significantly lower (mainly fishing lines). Thus, previous observations were confirmed that most plastic waste accumulates in the upper water layers.

Some plastic particles resemble zooplankton, and jellyfish or fish may mistake them for food. Large amounts of hard-to-degrade plastic (bottle caps and rings, disposable lighters) end up in the stomachs of seabirds and animals, in particular sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.

Thus, humanity has once again created a problem for itself. Much plastic decomposes very slowly. For example, the biological decomposition of polyethylene takes about two hundred years; polyvinyl chloride releases unsafe products when decomposed. Activities are planned to clean up the ocean surface using flotillas of specially equipped ships, but this is difficult to implement in practice, and, in addition, the collected garbage still needs to be processed. If we cannot solve the problem, we should not at least aggravate it. The first thing to do is to reduce the amount of waste entering the ocean and increase the production of packaging made from biodegradable plastics.

Everyone has heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Everyone has seen pictures of plastic bottles and tires floating on the surface, with the remains of birds whose stomachs are literally filled with plastic waste. In fact, this is not the case at all.

Miriam Goldstein, a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, doesn't know about the garbage patch from watching television. She took part in several expeditions to this object and even swam inside it.

“That picture of a guy in a boat has haunted me throughout my entire career!” Goldstein laughs, looking at a photo of a boat surrounded by plastic trash. The photo is captioned as a photo of the Pacific Garbage Patch. This is actually Manila Harbor. “I think this is a kind of “broken phone” launched through the media,” Goldstein comments. - Someone needed something dramatic to illustrate this story. And then, in the wilds of the Internet, an erroneous caption was attached to this picture.”

She recently completed research on ecosystem change in the North Pacific Gyre and the myths and reality of the Pacific Garbage Patch. Here are some of these myths and scientific facts.

“We have never seen anything like this picture,” says Miriam Holstein. “I’ve never seen it in person, and we’ve never seen it from satellite.”

Myth: There is a huge floating island made of solid waste in the Pacific Ocean

Fact: Millions of small and microscopic pieces of plastic float on the ocean surface - approximately 0.4 objects per square meter. meter on an area of about 5000 sq. kilometers. The amount of plastic waste has increased significantly over the past 40 years.

Most of these pieces, according to Goldstein, are no larger than a pinky fingernail. While she and her team have found large pieces of plastic debris such as buoys and tires, most of the debris is microscopic in size. It's not the size that's alarming, but the amount of plastic. To evaluate it, the researchers trawled the ocean surface. This method was invented by oceanographer Lanna Cheng. It has been in use since the 1970s. A paper published by Goldstein and her colleagues states: “Between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010, the amount of small plastic waste increased by two orders of magnitude, both in number and mass.”

Another famous photograph illustrating the harmful effects of plastic on all living things. However, the question is: did this bird die because it mistook plastic for food, or because it had nothing to eat except plastic?

Myth: all this plastic is killing animals

Fact: This harms some animals, while others thrive. It is this, and not the death of birds and fish, that creates the problem

Numerous green films and articles portray ocean plastic as an animal killer. Birds and fish mistake it for food, eat it, and then slowly and painfully die of starvation. Miriam Goldstein notes that there is clear evidence that both birds and fish eat plastic, but it is not certain that they die from it. Scientists usually conduct research on animals that have already died. But studies of dead albatrosses show that water pollution from plastic waste correlates with poor nutrition. That is, it can be assumed that birds eat plastic because they have nothing else to eat. None of the researchers can say whether there are birds that eat plastic and survive. To do this, they would have to be killed and dissected.

"We're not going to kill baby albatrosses to study their stomach contents," Goldstein says.

The situation is much more complicated with fish. Both Goldstein herself and other researchers found many live fish with stomachs filled with plastic. It is unclear whether this leads to her death or does not harm her at all, since the plastic is simply excreted in excrement. The digestive systems of fish and birds are structured differently, so what harms albatrosses may not have a significant impact on the well-being of the fish.

Finally, there is a class of living things that truly thrive on the influx of plastic. These include water striders, small crabs, barnacles and invertebrates called bryozoans that live on hard surfaces in the water. Some, such as barnacles and bryozoans, can cause great damage to ship hulls and damage other ecosystems they invade. Usually the life of these creatures is meager, they lurk in the depths of the ocean, where there are not so many hard surfaces - a tree trunk blown by unknown winds, rare shells, feathers or pieces of pumice. But now, with plenty of floating plastic around, it's a celebration of life for these once rare species.

In their paper, Goldstein and her colleagues presented compelling evidence that water striders are laying eggs on pieces of plastic in much larger numbers than ever before. Will this lead to an excess of water striders? Not necessary. Their eggs are large, yellow in color, that is, visible among the clear blue water. Perhaps that is why they will become easy prey for the fish and crabs that they serve as food. Regardless of the fate of the eggs, the balance in the ecosystem is upset when unexpectedly large numbers of water striders or crabs compete for food with other inhabitants of the aquatic environment.

Plastic bags are the most common type of trash in the ocean. In the United States, it was only in 1934 that the dumping of garbage into the ocean was legally prohibited. Before that, it was something like the main American landfill.

Myth: plastic mass is killing the ocean

Fact: plastic is hard surfaces that unbalance the ecosystem

Marine biologist Eric Zettler coined the term "plastisphere" to describe creatures (such as water striders) that thrive in aquatic environments with hard surfaces. They are like creatures that cling to docks or ship hulls. In the old days, before man-made hard surfaces became ubiquitous, they lived on rocks and floating debris. The plastisphere problem is a radical change to an ecosystem previously dominated by open ocean dwellers.

"The concern is that species can move on hard surfaces and cause environmental changes," Goldstein explains. - There are long-distance travelers among animals, and they can cause destruction. With the emergence of large pieces of plastic, these species are expanding their distribution, and could end up, for example, on the islands of the northwest Pacific Ocean, where the best coral reefs in the world are located.” In other words, it is not the plastisphere that destroys the ocean ecosystem, but the creatures that move on the plastic. Before our eyes, a gradual imbalance of the ecosystem is happening.

For now, the open ocean is still populated primarily by glowing anchovies.

“There is one glowing anchovy for every cubic meter of ocean,” says Goldstein, adding that the fish is likely more common than the pieces of plastic from her team’s catch. But if this continues, there will be more plastic than fish. The plastic brings with it more competing species, more water striders, and more creatures that feed on water strider eggs. The danger is that it could permanently change the open ocean - and destroy the natural living environment that has supported the health of the ocean for thousands of years.

Ocean currents form large eddies. In these relatively calm places, billions of tons of garbage accumulate, which ends up in the ocean due to human carelessness. The largest of these plastic islands has been talked about for many years. Recently, the Americans officially documented the existence of a “global garbage dump.”

The researchers traveled about 2,700 kilometers on their vessel, casting nets into the ocean hundreds of times and analyzing what they pulled aboard. Most of all, scientists were shocked by the huge amount of plastic that came across in one form or another every time.

The miniature crab never wanted to leave the piece of plastic pulled out of the water (photo by Scripps Institution of Oceanography).

“In the ocean, it’s extremely difficult to detect anything over and over again,” says lead researcher Miriam Goldstein, apparently recalling her quieter biological past.

In the future, all observations will be used primarily by participants in the Kaisei project, which united scientists, inventors, ecologists, sailors, sports enthusiasts and simply ocean lovers from all over the world. They are determined to thoroughly study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in order to figure out how to at least partially collect and process unwanted and harmful materials, for example, into diesel fuel.

By the way, we talked about another such “star” fanatic, who built an entire ship from plastic bottles and other “waste” and intends to sail across the entire Pacific Ocean on it.

Other debris found included (from top to bottom) glowing anchovies, flying fish and squid. Below: fish eggs, whose first refuge was... can you guess it? (photo by Scripps Institution of Oceanography)

According to various estimates, about 10% of plastic (of the 260 million tons produced annually) eventually ends up in the ocean. Most accumulate in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, but in all other oceans of the world there are the same garbage dumps, environmentalists are sure. (By the way, SEAPLEX’s next destination will be a “garbage patch” off the coast of South America; scientists know even less about it than about the hero of the current study. What if it turns out to be even bigger?)

Marcus Eriksen from the AMRF research organization once studied the relationship between plastic waste in the ocean and plastic production by industrial enterprises.

In 1999, the Pacific garbage dump contained about 0.002 grams of plastic per square meter; in 2005, this value increased to 0.004. During this time, in North America alone, the amount of plastic produced increased several dozen times.

Meet me. This is Lucky, the expedition's unofficial mascot. Scientists discovered the stuffed toy in fishing nets on August 15, 2009 (photo by Scripps Institution of Oceanography).

According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), about 70% of trash that ends up in the ocean drowns. So it is still unknown what piles of waste are also formed on the ocean floor and whether biologists will ever get to them.

Note that not only the decomposition of plastic is harmful to the environment. Sea turtles and dolphins are caught in old, unnecessary fishing nets, which, of course, threatens the size of their populations. Birds mistakenly feed pieces of plastic to their chicks, who not only choke, but are also poisoned by the decomposition products of harmful substances in the body.

Jellyfish and some other creatures confuse the same “confetti” with plankton and also get sick (but recently it became known that jellyfish play an important role in the global mixing of ocean waters). Gradually, plastic is integrated into food chains, poisoning more and more sea creatures, and with them, humans!

Some of the garbage is thrown back onto the shore, negatively affecting the existence of coastal animal species. Environmental organizations are sounding the alarm, but in order to convey the necessary information to ordinary people, government and industrialists, it is first necessary to obtain and analyze it ourselves. So expeditions are sent to new “natural phenomena”.

In theory, every person should think about such ocean pollution. Because even those people who live far from the ocean pollute it one way or another. This has long been proven by numerous other studies.

Typical picture. According to estimates in 2006, about 18 thousand pieces of plastic were found on every square kilometer of the ocean surface. In some regions, the amount of confetti exceeds the amount of plankton six times. Photos were taken during an expedition organized as part of the Ship to Shore Education Program (photo from ship2shore.blogspot.com).

Environmentalists make a fairly simple argument: about 2.5 billion people eat fish in its pure form, on average it makes up about 20% of their protein diet. Pollution of fishing regions leads to food spoilage. But a lot of other products are also made from fish.

Conservationists and scientists ask not to think that the ocean is far away, but to constantly remember that ocean pollution in 80% of cases begins with the kitchen sink, drainage and sewer pipes, a car taking garbage to a seemingly ordinary landfill, an innocent picnic after which some, or even all, of the garbage remained on the grass. Factories dump waste into rivers and lakes. Harmful substances from the air enter the water with rain. And so on and so forth…

In developing countries, slightly less waste is produced, but the recycling of what is created is at an incredibly low level (photo by Wallace J. Nichols).

On the websites of various environmental organizations, here and there new ingenious (and not so ingenious) solutions to the problem pop up, which are offered by ordinary people.

“Once a week, we find at least one unusual ocean cleanup proposal on our blog,” says AMRF's Anna Cummins. — Someone suggests collecting large debris from the surface of the ocean with nets, then dropping them using a helicopter into the mouths of volcanoes to turn them into stone. Others are to “vacuum” the bottom and then turn the plastic into an alternative source of energy.”

Almost all of the collected samples have been carefully studied, but the data obtained will be processed within several months (photo by Algalita Marine Research Foundation).

Moore believes that the best solution can only be a global awareness of the need to change habits and stop garbage from entering the ocean. In his opinion, it is useless to try to clear the water of what has already accumulated in the Pacific Ocean.

Charles is strongly supported by Alexandra and Philippe Cousteau, grandchildren of the famous Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who promote the conservation of the riches of the world's oceans. “We live on a planet, most of which is covered by water. Life originated in water. Ocean pollution is an unacceptable thing,” complains Alexandra. In general, everything comes back to the banal phrase: “It’s clean not where they sweep, but where they don’t litter.”

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “North Pacific Gyre”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, whatever they call this giant island of garbage, which is growing at a gigantic pace. There has been talk about garbage island for more than half a century, but virtually no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being caused to the environment, and entire species of animals are becoming extinct. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be fixed. So, read more about the problem of ocean pollution below

In addition to the topic of the most polluted cities in the world, I invite you to familiarize yourself with another egregious case of environmental pollution.

Pollution started from the time plastic was invented. On the one hand, it is an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It makes it easier until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic takes more than a hundred years to decompose, and thanks to ocean currents it gathers into 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, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris being dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean creatures) suffer the most. Plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean is responsible for the death of more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100 thousand marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these objects, mistaking them for food

"Trash Island" has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the characteristics of the North Pacific Current System, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, the current mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and its 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 a "garbage iceberg". In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island area by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact the largest landfill on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of underwater currents that have turbulence. The swath of "soup" stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the North Pacific Ocean, past Hawaii and just shy of distant Japan.

14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman, Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to test his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.

“For a week, every time I went on deck, plastic junk floated past,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? “I couldn’t believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge area of water?” I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight...”

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 brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would have awaited the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage 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 film a new film in Hawaii, almost had a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic has not only ruined 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 American media. Last week, AMRF's founder warned that unless consumers limit their use of non-recyclable plastic, the surface area of the "garbage soup" will double in the next 10 years, threatening not only Hawaii but the entire Pacific Rim.

But in general, they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island; its consistency resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in the water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that gets here ends up in the bottom layers, so we don’t even know exactly how much trash can accumulate there. Since plastic is transparent and lies directly below the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from a satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of a ship or when scuba diving. But sea vessels rarely visit this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for the fact that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Gyre is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no one's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage dump cycle to a living creature: “It moves around the planet like a large animal let off 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 patch burps, the whole beach is covered in this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, replete with debris, poses a risk 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 as chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs along with food. "What ends up in the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean's inhabitants, and then on your plate. It's very simple."

The main ocean polluters are China and India. Here it is considered normal to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water. Below is a photo that makes no sense to comment.

There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical eddy here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade wind currents and inter-trade wind countercurrents. The North Pacific Whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where a wide variety of rubbish - algae, animal corpses, wood, ship wrecks - has been carried away for centuries from all over the world. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific Whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, no mammals, no birds. No one except colonies of zooplankton. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here, even military and merchant ships try to avoid this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the early 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 subject to biological decay processes and do not disappear anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, with a total mass six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of all garbage patches even exceeds the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude

A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. Previously, there were legends about an island made from the wreckage of ships and masts, which drifts in those waters, now the wooden wreckage has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we encounter real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced worldwide each year, 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 giving up plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made of biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to buy juice and water in glass containers or in tetra bags.

There has been talk about garbage island for more than half a century, but virtually no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being caused to the environment, and entire species of animals are becoming extinct. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be corrected.

"Trash Island" has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the characteristics of the North Pacific Current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, the current mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and its 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 a “garbage iceberg”. In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island area by six times.

American oceanographer Charles Moore, the discoverer of this “great Pacific garbage patch,” also known as the “garbage gyre,” believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said yesterday: “People initially thought it was an island of plastic waste that you could almost walk on. This view is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It’s simply endless—perhaps twice the size of the continental United States.” The story of Moore's discovery of the garbage patch is quite interesting:
14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman, Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to test his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.