Last summer, Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal were adrift on a makeshift raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As seasoned sailors and ocean conservationists, their mission was simple if not brazenly quixotic – to build a boat out of plastic trash and salvaged ship parts and sail it from California to Hawaii to draw attention to the growing plague of plastics in the oceans.
In a mere two and a half months, the men fashioned 15,000 reclaimed plastic bottles into six, 30-foot-long pontoons, added a few sailboat masts, and attached an old fuselage from a Cessna 310 aircraft to serve as their cabin. Dispensing with any symbolism, they named the raft JUNK and with nothing but the currents and wind to propel them, set sail from Long Beach on June 1.
"We started sinking from day one," Eriksen says. Almost immediately, ocean waves unwound caps from about 1,000 plastic bottles, which promptly began filling with water. They solved their wayward cap problem with epoxy, but over the next three months, drifting at approximately 1.5 miles per hour across 2,600 miles of open ocean, the men endured an unrelenting barrage of fraying ropes and nets, cracking masts and loosening eyebolts. And those were just the maintenance problems. "We got hit with squalls daily," says Eriksen. "And we had to stay clear of the hurricanes. There were three hurricanes that passed within a few hundred miles of us."
SARAH KLAINHermit crabs, spotted on beaches in the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica and Micronesia, have swapped their shells for PVC pipe, old film canisters and the caps from detergent bottles.A former Marine and Gulf War veteran, Eriksen is barely shaken in the face of harrowing adventure. If anything, he seems to thrive on it. What did surprise him, however, was an event that occurred about two-thirds of the way through the journey when he did what any man who'd been subsisting for weeks on peanut butter and canned beans in the middle of the ocean would do – he went fishing. "I pulled out this little ten-inch-long rainbow runner," he recalls. "I actually filleted it, planning to eat it. The fillet's in the pan. I open its stomach and I couldn't believe it. I counted 17 fragments of plastic in its gut. This is a fish that you see in fish markets. You see them on menus in restaurants. And here was one that we harvested to eat directly from the sea. And now we're seeing that they're eating our trash."
'GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH'
It's been more than 10 years since Capt. Charles Moore discovered what has come to be known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" on his way home to California from a yacht race in Hawaii. Moore took a detour, grazing the southern edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a unique ocean region that features a high pressure system of little to no wind hovering atop a convergence of ocean currents. The result is an eerily becalmed sea that sailors long ago dubbed "the doldrums" and have steadfastly avoided ever since.
Moore was stunned by what he saw – copious amounts of trash ranging from large recognizable items like plastic bags and detergent bottles down to tiny plastic fragments resembling confetti. Scientists have since learned that trash is accumulating in this remote region of the North Pacific by the ton and that 60 to 80 percent of that trash comes from land, swept into storm drains and out to sea or blown from beaches.
Upon his return, Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to study the gyre. Over the last decade, Moore, along with Eriksen, who serves as the foundation's director of education, have made several research expeditions to the region. Eriksen doesn't mince words in relaying the results of their latest analyses. "The amount of trash on the ocean's surface has doubled," he says. "And that's just in 10 years."
MARKUS ERIKSENEriksen discovered plastic fragments in the stomach of the 10-inch rainbow runner he caught at sea.
What we're learning now, however, is that this phenomenon of aggregating trash isn't isolated to the North Pacific – it's global. As reported by The Royal Society in its July 27 issue, "Plastics have been found on the seabed of all seas and oceans across the planet."For some time, scientists have been speculating as to whether tons of trash are accumulating in the four other major oceanic gyres in the South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Could the same combination of wind, waves and currents that trap trash in the North Pacific have created four other "great garbage patches?" A new map from a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology may help to relieve some of the guesswork.
"This is the first accurate map of surface circulation in the world. No one's ever done this before," says Dr. Peter Niiler of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a world expert on ocean circulation and co-author of the study. Using data collected over the last 20 years from over 14,000 drifting buoys planted worldwide, Niiler and his co-authors have successfully displaced centuries of speculative ocean circulation based on cobbled-together regional buoy studies and anecdotal observations of ship drift.
The map depicts the world with continents grayed out. The oceans, awash in color, are covered in a swarm of wavy, black lines that represent currents. The colors range from a deep red at the equator, indicating high current velocities, to yellow as you move out from the equator and currents slow, to greens and blues, marking slower currents still. And finally, where we know each oceanic gyre to be, is a white spot designating minimal to no current velocity. Large swaths of the current lines come together and then stop.
If we use the North Pacific as a reference point, sure enough, where Algalita's researchers have found high concentrations of trash in the eastern and western areas of the ocean, there are two white spots. Moreover, if we move directly east into the region of the North Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea, we hit another large white spot. Here, according to researchers at the Sea Education Association and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, another area dense in plastics exists. The researchers are currently preparing to publish a study that will unveil what co-author Dr. Chris Reddy calls "an incredibly thorough, scientifically robust data set" that examines 60,000 pieces of plastic collected from the region over 22 years.
"Now I'm going to tell you where the totally new thing is," Niiler says. "Go directly to the South Pacific." Here the map shows another white spot just off the coast of Chile and a bit south and east of Easter Island. But this one is different. It bears the most dramatic sweep of current lines across nearly the entire ocean basin (roughly 6,000 kilometers by Niiler's estimation), all of which feed that single area. If there's one area of the ocean with the potential to host the largest garbage patch, this is it.
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