Pacific Garbage Patch, Revisited

June 27, 2009

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Two weeks ago my friend Captain Charles Moore – discoverer of the now-famed North Pacific Garbage Patch – pushed off from the docks in Long Beach aboard the ORV Alguita for a four-month-long exploration of the sizable floating plastic trash pile he initially brought to light a decade ago.

The 2009 exploration, divided into two segments, will first take Moore and his team to Hawaii and then to the heart of the swirling gyre, where he first measured six times as much plastic afloat near the surface as plankton.

The first leg, June 10- July 25, is underway and should take the crew around the North West Hawaiian islands, north of Midway and Kure.

Their pre-cruise expectation: The quantity of plastic pollution in the ocean is increasing rapidly, paralleling the rapid rise in global plastic production. Each time the ORV Alguita crew collects samples from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), we find that the abundance of plastic has increased since our previous visit. In previous research voyages we have found a very high abundance of plastic in the area of the gyre that has come to be known as “The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch”, but we suspect that the contamination is much more widespread. This summer we will have the opportunity to test this hypothesis during the first voyage of our four month research expedition. During this voyage the ORV Alguita research crew will be at sea for over six weeks as they sail west from California past the Northern Hawaiian Islands as far as the International Date Line (180 degrees longitude) to sample areas of the Pacific Ocean previously un-sampled for plastic marine debris. We will be collecting samples of plastic debris, plankton and fish to analyze back in our laboratory to better understand not only the quantity of plastic debris pollution in remote areas of the ocean, but also the impacts the plastic is having as it is consumed by marine animals. Below is a map that shows the area where ORV Alguita has sampled for plastic pollution over the past 10 years. The first voyage of the summer expedition hopes to extend the study area all the way to the International Date Line at 180 degrees longitude.

The second leg of the expedition, expected to begin early in August, will take the boat on a giant loop one thousand miles north of Hawaii, into the NPSG. Moore is convinced the percentage of plastic in the gyre will have increased during the past decade, but this exploration will bring back hard evidence. While lots of people have talked about visiting the site it is tricky to reach – halfway across the Pacific Ocean, between Russia and California – so very few scientific efforts have actually taken place.

Moore and crew are posting  daily logs, so … tune in.