Trashing the Oceans
An armada of plastic rides the waves, and sea creatures are suffering
With little scientific training, Moore formed alliances with professional scientists, including chemists, biologists, and a private oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, himself a well-known flotsam hunter. Ebbesmeyer's most famous case involved a 1990 containership spill that dumped 80,000 Nike running shoes into the North Pacific. The errant runners washed up on beaches from British Columbia to California, helping him trace the currents that carried them.
The Alguita's mission started in earnest in 1999. Moore and his all-volunteer crew--attracted by the chance for meaningful adventure and Moore's reputation as an excellent chef--returned to the garbage-strewn region he had happened on two years earlier and skimmed the surface with fine collecting nets. Across hundreds of miles of ocean, they counted roughly a million pieces of plastic per square mile, almost all of it less than a few millimeters across.
Trash heap. The Alguita was sampling water beneath a climate feature called the North Pacific subtropical high--the big "H" on weather maps--that protects Southern California's enviable weather by pushing storms north or south. The H is the eye of a circle of currents thousands of miles wide called the North Pacific gyre. The high's weak winds and sluggish currents naturally collect flotsam, earning it the unfortunate nickname of the "Eastern Garbage Patch." Similar wind and current patterns exist in all the major oceans, and all presumably suffer from similar contamination.
Because most plastics are lighter than seawater, they float on the surface for years, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller fragments--which often end up in the ocean's drifting, filter-feeding animals, like jellyfish. Early in his voyages, Moore collected baseball-size gelatinous animals called salps and found their translucent tissues clogged with bits of monofilament fishing line and nurdles (more romantically referred to as "mermaid tears" by beachcombers). A hundred billion pounds of these pellets are produced each year, to be formed into everything from CD cases to plastic pipe. But each one is a perfect plankton's-eye-view replica of a fish egg. "You rarely find any particles smaller than a millimeter in the water," says Moore. "They're all in the jellies."
That's not likely to be good for the filter feeders or the things that eat them, notes Moore, and not just because a meal of plastic doesn't yield much nutrition. A 2001 paper by Japanese researchers reported that plastic debris can act like a sponge for toxic chemicals, soaking up a millionfold greater concentration of such deadly compounds as PCBs and DDE, a breakdown product of the notorious insecticide DDT, than the surrounding seawater. That could turn a bellyful of plastic from a mere stomachache to a toxic gut bomb that can work its way through the food web.
Unhappy hunting. In Moore's latest voyage to the garbage patch, he got a close-up view of what happens when life meets floating garbage. The Alguita's crew found plastic trash bobbing in a thick line from horizon to horizon--everything from tiny particles to 5-inch-thick towing lines, Japanese traffic cones, and yellow quart bottles of American crankcase oil. "We followed the debris for more than a mile, and we never found the end of it," Moore told U.S. News by satellite phone. The research team had stumbled across what oceanographers call a Langmuir cell, a wind-driven circulation pattern where two masses of water are pushed together, forcing some of the water to sink where they meet; anything that floats stays on the surface.
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