The year was running 1997 when the American captain and oceanographer Charles Moore He was horrified when he returned with his sailboat from a famous nautical race in the Pacific Ocean.
While sailing through the largest ocean on the planet, Moore stumbled with a sea of plastic so extensive that it took seven days to cross it. Since then that large mass of plastic was known as the Pacific plastic island or the great plastic patch of the Pacific.
That was the first time it was made public. garbage island in the pacificone of the biggest symptoms of the environmental crisis that the planet is suffering.
More than 20 years later, The large island has become a continent: the plastic stain extends to 1.6 million square km and some 80,000 tons of plastic that does not stop growing, according to a scientific study published in 2018 and updated in 2023 by the magazine Nature.
Although this size For example triple that of France or five times that of the Province of Buenos Aires, The plastic continent of the Pacific is invisible to satellites as it is made up of 94% tiny plastic fragments that break off from larger ones due to erosion.
“The name Pacific Garbage Patch has led many to believe that this area is a large patch. and continuous stream of easily visible marine debris, such as bottles and other debris, similar to a literal island of trash that should be visible with aerial or satellite photography. This is not the case. While higher concentrations of trash can be found in this area, much of the debris is actually small pieces of floating plastic that are not immediately obvious to the naked eye“, they explain from the United States Ocean Administration.
And they added that ocean debris is continuously mixed by wind and wave action and is widely dispersed both over large surfaces and in the upper part of the water column.
Call “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (Great Pacific Garbage Patch, GPGP), this mass is made up of a large space of waste (bags, bottles, packaging, abandoned fishing nets and degraded microparticles) that pile up in several areas, under the effect of giant whirlwinds formed by ocean currents.
This accumulation of garbage was generated by the millions of tons of scattered plastic waste in the ocean that are carried by currents towards the North Pacific Gyre (a point of convergence of currents where water remains static). At that point, the rotation currents grouped them together and returned them cohesively to the ocean. This is how a large soup of floating garbage that is drifting today was formed.
When plastic waste flows into the sea, it ends up being fragmented into smaller pieces due to erosion and external agents, such as the sun, wind or microorganisms.
For this reason, of the 1.8 trillion plastics that make up the North Pacific blob, 94% consists of microplastics.
The garbage island in the Pacific Ocean is not the only garbage island that exists, although it was the first of which we have records. In successive years, other garbage islands have been discovered: such as the North Atlantic (2009), the Indian Ocean (2010) and the South Pacific (2011). And in 2017, the existence of the last one in the South Atlantic was confirmed.
the scientist Laurent Lebreton, He is the lead author of both studies published in Nature and belongs to The Ocean Cleanup Foundation based in the Netherlands.
“The situation is getting worse. “This highlights the urgency to take action to stop the arrival of plastics in the ocean, as well as to clean up the mess that has already formed,” explained the environmental expert who worked for three years investigating the plastic island. , during which he has used boats and planes to map this area.
Located in the north of the Pacific Ocean, the island of plastic garbage is subject to rotating currents and winds that cause marine debris of all types, but mainly plastic, to converge creating an area of garbage which is called an island.
“Contrary to popular opinion, most of the garbage island is made of microplastics that give shape to a floating surface, while only some bottles, containers and all kinds of wrappers at the ends maintain their original appearance”, point out from the Aquae Foundation.
However, the new study reveals that waste is becoming habitat of various species. The samples collected revealed that in 103 tons of plastic waste, the team analyzed the plastics and discovered that among the main inhabitants of the garbage island are anemones, hydroids and small crustaceans called amphipods.
These “neopelagic communities”, described in the study Not only They have colonized the plastic of the garbage island, they also managed to thrive in the open sea like never before thanks to waste from the Pacific. The main concern of scientists is the ability of these species to modify the ecosystem and represent a threat for native species in an environment that has remained unchanged for millennia before the existence of plastic.
The study states that microplastics account for 8% of the island’s total weight. The rest are larger plastics. Their large presence increases the danger for the ecosystem, since these fragments are small in size and are easily consumed by marine animals.
Indeed, thousands of fish, birds and marine mammals die every year when they mistake these microplastics for food and suffer irreversible poisoning. And the problem does not end there; Many of these microplastics later end up being present in the diet we eat, as is the case with fish, shellfish or even salt produced for food.
It is estimated that every year 100,000 marine animals are injured, suffocated or drowned by plastic waste present in the sea.. Likewise, the presence of microplastics can have shocking consequences on human health. In 2016, a report from the Food Organization of the United Nations (FAO) pointed out the presence of microplastics in up to 800 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans.
Several data can be highlighted from the Nature study:
- Plastics make up 99.9% of all waste on Garbage Island.
- 46% of the plastics are fishing nets and more than three quarters of the plastics were pieces longer than 5 cm. These include hard plastics, plastic sheets, and plastic film.
- Of 50 objects analyzed for their production date, one was found to be from 1977. On the other hand, 7 belonged to the 1980s, 17 from the 1990s, 24 from the 2000s and 1 from the following decade.
- Among all the garbage, only common plastics such as polyethylene or polypropylene were thick enough to float.
If current trends in waste production and management continue, there could be 12 billion tons of plastic waste in landfills and in the natural environment by 2050.
