The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

An overview of the disaster

The term Great Pacific Garbage Patch refers to the massive amount of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean. Captain Charles Moore discovered this when he returned from a sailing competition. He decided to sail back through a gyre. About a decade ago, it was discovered that the gyre (circular flow) North Pacific had high tons of plastic patch in what quickly became known as the "great Pacific garbage patch". The news became a wake-up call that showed that even the remotest parts of the globe were not immune to our culture of waste. There are five main circular currents (gyres) in the Earth's oceans. In January, members of the advocacy group the "5 Gyres" were organized to study the North Atlantic gyre. They suspected that the waters of the world were more contaminated than anyone imagined and that a "great Atlantic garbage patch" may lie somewhere between the Virgin Islands of the United States and Bermuda (Berton, 2007).

Factors that led up to the disaster

The center of the vortex Grand North Pacific is located in latitude between the Ferrel cell and the Hadley cell. It is a relatively quiet area of the Pacific Ocean, to which the rotational motion of the vortex brings the floating waste. These wastes accumulate benches. Until recently, the debris of organic underwent biodegradation. Human activities are now bringing debris non-biodegradable materials, such as polymers and debris from boats. Plastic materials are photo degraded pieces and particles smaller and smaller, but the individual molecules are only very slowly metabolized by living organisms. Photodegradation of plastics leads to the production of waste pollutants harmful to the marine environment (Moore, 2003).

Environmental impact of disaster

Plastics have a lifetime average that exceeds five hundred years. Over time, they disintegrate without their molecular structure change one iota. Thus appear huge amounts of a type of sand plastic, for animals, has all the appearance of food. These plastics are impossible to digest and difficult to remove, they accumulate in the stomachs of fish, jellyfish and sea birds. Moreover, these plastic grains act like sponges, fixing many toxins in amounts several million times higher than normal, such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a pesticide) and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and highly toxic products (Berton, 2007).

Human health impact of disaster

The situation in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a great calamity. Thanks to ...