The Great Pacific Ocean “Garbage Patch” is an environmental blight that humanity has given planet earth and the Pacific Ocean.
The garbage island is also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex which is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean. In an intriguing report by VBS.TV gives interesting insights about Garbage Island that is deemed to one of the biggest environmental disasters. Garbage Island is as big as the size of Texas and due to Flotsam being sucked in to this area by the circulating currents – it has become something like crap-strewn desert in the middle of the ocean.
Garbage Island looks like any other part of the ocean to the naked eye but every once in a while something very strange would float by to prove it otherwise. The waste on Garbage Island can be attributed to careless and sloppy sailors but research proves it quite the contrary. Researchers say that Garbage Island is composed of trash out of which 80% originates on land. Garbage Island is not just a mere floating island of trash – it has had hazardous effects on the water.
It is growing larger and larger as the days and weeks go by and considered by many environmentalists as the biggest human waste dump in the world! Located in the center of the Northern Pacific Ocean roughly between the 135th degree and 40th degree latitude and longitude the ocean “landfill” is stuck in the vortex of the horse latitudes gyre found there. The field of debris is so large you can see it from the air as you fly to Hawaii. This blight of the modern world is presently under intense study by various scientists, who are trying to determine what to do about the growing danger to aquatic life and the food chain.
Here are some terrible facts about this toxic mass of PLASTIC GARBAGE:
- The size of foul field of Trash is 2 times the size of Texas.
- It is said 1/5th of junk trapped in the “garbage patch” comes from ship dumping and the rest of the trash comes from human land trash.
- Environmental researchers believe 90% of the trash in the ocean dump is from plastic, which is not bio-degradable.
- Some environmentalists say there is 3.5 million tons of waste swirling in the Pacific vortex near the beautiful Hawaiian Islands.
- Thousands of birds and sea-life creatures are dying from eating plastic particles in this huge debris field, because they can not digest the plastic and it dehydrates them or stops their digestive system from functioning.
- Some of the tiny plastic bits pass into the living systems of marine life and travel up the food chain until it lands on your dinner plate or in your fish sandwich! And, yikes…. Gulp…. you have eaten residual plastic! Perhaps a piece of your plastic grocery bag, water bottle, used condom or plastic chips bag ends up in your stomach.
- HOPE – Project Kaisei, launched in March of 2009, is trying to assess the possibility of recycling some of the debris floating in the massive Pacific gyre.
