"It's like a big, toxic soup."
You might have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But it’s actually not a garbage “patch.” And there are five of them...
You might have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But it’s actually not a garbage “patch.” And there are five of them...
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00:00When people think of a garbage patch, they think of something that you could go
00:03and jump on and walk across. It is really like
00:06a big toxic soup. These things are huge.
00:20If you're talking to somebody on the street,
00:24they would think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If you're talking to ocean
00:28scientists, they might refer to it as the North Pacific Gyre. The fire gyres in
00:33the ocean are effectively these like mega whirlpool-like
00:37currents. There's two gyres in the Pacific, two gyres
00:41in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean. This spinning
00:44motion collects and picks up plastic. It goes next to one coast,
00:48around to another, around to another coast, and then traps it
00:52in these gyres.
00:56One of the things that people don't appreciate
00:59is the vast size of these gyres. Sometimes you could have this mass of
01:05plastic soup that is the size of Texas. Some folks say the size of a couple
01:09Texases. You could sail across one of these features
01:14for days.
01:19There is a major misconception that this is a big island that you could drive a
01:23boat to, kind of like water world style, jump out on
01:26and go for a jog across. That's not the case. It is
01:30really like a big toxic soup. You see an increase in the
01:35concentration of big plastics, but there's an even
01:39higher concentration of small plastics that are constantly broken down to
01:43smaller and smaller pieces. Scientists call these microplastics,
01:46which is a sponge for toxins from the oceans that a sea turtle
01:50or a seabird might eat and is so challenging to clean up, is a lot
01:56scarier to me, honestly, than some big massive trash
02:00islands.
02:06We eat a lot of these species. So when you have seafood, you're buying fish that
02:10themselves have ingested some of these plastics and some of these toxins. So
02:13there's a lot of uncertain consequences that are being
02:17studied actively right now. Does that mean there are less
02:19food or less fish because we are losing fish and other wildlife
02:24from these sections of the oceans? Does that mean that some of these toxins are
02:27coming back to our own plates or plates of seafood
02:30were put in front of our kids?
02:36There are islands that dot these oceans, for example, in the Pacific,
02:41and they are the unhappy recipients as these gyres are spinning and carrying
02:44with them all this plastic. So a lot of Pacific island communities
02:48and a lot of uninhabited islands, which are home for some pretty amazing ocean
02:52wildlife, are becoming a bit like garbage bins
02:56because of all this plastic that washes up on their shores.
03:04The North Pacific gyre happens to move around some
03:08very populated areas, big cities on the west coast of the United States,
03:12big cities on the eastern coast of the Asia-Pacific
03:17communities. It becomes this big international
03:21cosmopolitan trash accumulation.
03:27Interestingly, it's this international character of these gyres
03:32that makes them really hard to clean up.
03:34The good news is because we're connected to it, we get to do something about it
03:37with our decisions in terms of how we say yes and hopefully no to
03:42single-use throw-away plastic pollution. That is you,
03:45that is me, that is part of that problem. So it's scary, but it's also exciting
03:52because that means we can do something about it.