In which ocean is a giant garbage funnel. Garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean: where is the lie, and where is the truth. Possible solutions to the problem

Clogging of water bodies with human waste is one of the topical problems of our time. Some of the garbage decomposes over time, but a considerable mass of it settles to the bottom or remains floating on the water surface, causing enormous damage. environment.

Huge accumulations of garbage, resembling islands or even entire continents in size, are often found in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. Researchers of this phenomenon compare it with "garbage soup": part of the waste does not sink, but floats on the surface or in the water column - and such "spots" of garbage stretch for many kilometers.

Where does such a large amount of human waste come from in the ocean?

First of all, this is what is thrown into the water by residents and guests of cities located in close proximity to the seas.

For example, environmentalists call India, Thailand and China the leaders in water pollutants with garbage, where the discharge of everything unnecessary into rivers and seas is considered practically the norm.

Particularly actively and thoughtlessly, tourists usually litter, resting on warm sea coasts all over the world. From them, cigarette butts fall into the water, plastic bottles and cans from various drinks, glasses, corks, plastic bags, disposable tableware, cocktail tubes and other household waste.

But that's not all. Let's remember school lessons. Rivers flow into the seas, the seas are part of the ocean waters, which make up more than 95% of the entire water shell of the Earth - the hydrosphere. Thus, most of the garbage thrown into the rivers, carried by the current, will also end up in the ocean.

According to scientists, about 80% of the volume of this giant water dump comes from the "land". And only the remaining 20% are the waste of "marine" human activities:

broken fishing nets;
waste from floating oil drilling rigs;
garbage thrown from ships, etc.

All this rubbish that enters the ocean goes with the flow and, finally, accumulates in certain places of "calm", where it forms whole "floating dumps" on the waves.

Pacific Garbage

The world's largest water dump is located in the North Pacific Ocean. It is there that ocean currents form a kind of funnel where garbage is pulled together.

The result is a real "dead sea" of rotting waste, marine flora, corpses of aquatic life, shipwrecks. And since the middle of the twentieth century, the floating remains of plastic, which naturally decomposes over several hundred years, began to accumulate here rapidly.

"Great Pacific garbage patch”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, “Garbage Iceberg” - as soon as they are not called in the means mass media this is a huge accumulation of floating waste and garbage, located between Hawaii and California.

The exact dimensions are still unknown. According to rough estimates, its weight can be more than 3.5 million tons, with an area occupied by 10 or more million square kilometers.

According to the structure, the "garbage iceberg" is divided into two large parts - Western (closer to the shores of Japan and China) and Eastern (not far from California and Hawaii).

Garbage Island Facts pacific ocean:

Even before the actual discovery, its existence was announced in 1988 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Such conclusions were made by scientists based on observations of the oceans, the movement of accumulations of waste in them, as well as the nature of the currents.
Officially, the “garbage bin” was opened in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore: traveling on a yacht, he ended up in part body of water, covered for miles with debris floating on the surface. The discovery impressed Moore so much that he wrote several articles about it, which attracted the attention of the whole world to the problem. Subsequently, he became the founder of an environmental organization for the study of the oceans.
About 70% of waste sinks, so the so-called "garbage soup", which occupies a huge area on the surface of the water, is only one third of the total volume of the "world's water dump".
More than a million seabirds and aquatic mammals die each year from plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean.
There are forecasts that promise a doubling of the scale of the "continent of waste" in just a decade, if humanity does not reduce the volume of consumed (and discarded) plastic products.

The production of plastic products in the world is still growing steadily every year. Accordingly, an increasing amount of it ends up in natural reservoirs.

For more details on the Pacific Garbage, see the video materials:

Danger and consequences of pollution of ocean waters

The damage that garbage islands cause to the environment, and, as a result, to the life and health of the people themselves, is simply enormous:

In vast areas of the ocean, sunlight does not penetrate through the water column polluted with waste. As a result, algae and plankton die in these areas, which in turn are food for the inhabitants of the depths. Lack of nutrition can lead to their extinction and further complete disappearance.
The main volume of garbage is all kinds of plastics. The period of its complete natural decomposition in natural environment, according to environmentalists, can be from 100 to 500 years. That is, at the moment, all this mass does not decrease, but only increases due to daily new receipts.
Under the influence of the sun, plastic gradually breaks down into small granules that are able to absorb toxins from the environment, turning into a real poison.
Plastic particles are eaten by animals. This is because its pieces are overgrown with algae, and small granules look like eggs and the same plankton. Often eaten by birds and fish, plastic becomes the cause of their death. Even if the animal survives, in any case it receives chronic poisoning with harmful substances that cause diseases and mutations.
Waste that covers the bottom of the oceans destroys the habitat of the inhabitants of the deep.

The laws of the food chain are inexorable and fair: as a result, plastic poisons inevitably affect commercial fish species, and through them harm human health.

Note! Ocean Trash Facts:

scientists believe that by 2050 plastic will be eaten by almost all birds and marine life without exception;
about 40% of albatrosses die precisely because of the pecking of plastic as food;
about 9% of fish have plastic residues in their stomachs, and according to scientists, in general, fish eat up to 20 tons of polymer waste per year.

If you combine all the "garbage patches" into one, you get an area larger than the size of the United States of America. And while every year this "water dump" only expands its boundaries.

How to deal with the problem?

It would seem obvious that the problem of waste in the seas and oceans needs to be solved by the whole world and as soon as possible! But so far, no one has really done it. Garbage accumulates in neutral waters, and none of the countries wants to take responsibility, and most importantly, bear the financial costs associated with solving this problem.

But it is worth noting that these expenses are unlikely to be within the power of the budget of one, even a developed, country - the amount of garbage accumulated in the oceans is too large.

The solution proposed by ecologists sounds, albeit categorically, but reasonable. In their opinion, humanity as a whole needs to, if not completely abandon plastic and polyethylene, then at least reduce its production and consumption to the bare minimum.

Also a serious step in solving the problem is the need for environmentally friendly recycling of plastic waste.

Important! Of course, each of us individually is not able to solve the problem of plastic pollution of the earth in full, but each of us is able to make his personal contribution to the protection of natural resources:

reduce the amount of plastic and polyethylene used, giving preference to containers and packaging made of natural materials: cloth and paper bags and packages, wooden and cardboard boxes, etc.;
in no case should you throw objects from any type of plastic into water, on the ground or even in the general mass of garbage, but store them in special containers marked “for plastic” or take them to recycling centers for further processing and disposal.

Will people heed the calls of environmentalists, or is humanity destined to perish from the waste of its own life, its own frivolity? So far, the problem of "garbage spots" in the water expanses of the Earth remains as acute as it was five and ten years ago. Separate attempts by enthusiasts to cope with the garbage in the ocean are just a drop in the ocean, huge funds and significant forces are needed to solve this problem.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch Pacific Trash Vortex North Pacific Gyre Pacific Garbage Island which is growing at a tremendous pace. The garbage island has been talked about for more than half a century, but little action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being done to the environment, and entire species of animals are dying out. There is a high probability that the moment will come when nothing can be fixed. So, read more about the problem of ocean pollution below

In addition to the topic of the most polluted cities in the world, I suggest you familiarize yourself with another egregious case of environmental pollution.

Pollution has been around since the invention of plastic. On the one hand, an irreplaceable thing that has made life incredibly easier for people. Facilitated until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island, larger than the US state of Texas, floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these items, mistaking them for food.

Garbage Island has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, at present, the mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and the area is more than a million square kilometers. The "island" has a number of unofficial names: "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", "Eastern Garbage Patch", "Pacific Trash Vortex", etc. In Russian it is sometimes called also a "garbage iceberg". In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island zone by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact, the largest dumping ground on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of undercurrents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California through northern part the Pacific Ocean past Hawaii and narrowly misses distant Japan.

14 years ago, young playboy and yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to take a vacation in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out in the ocean and his new yacht. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he swam into the trash.

“During the week, whenever I went on deck, some plastic junk floated by,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? - I could not believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge water area? I had to swim through this garbage dump day after day, and there was no end in sight ... "

Swimming through tons of household waste turned Moore's life upside down. He sold all his shares and, with the proceeds, founded the environmental organization Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), which began to study the ecological state of the Pacific Ocean. His reports and warnings were often brushed aside and not taken seriously. Probably, a similar fate would have awaited the current AMRF report, but here nature itself helped environmentalists - January storms threw more than 70 tons of plastic garbage onto the beaches of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. They say that the son of the famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who went to Hawaii to shoot a new film, almost got a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, the name Moore has not left the pages of the American media. Last week, the founder of AMRF warned that if consumers do not limit the use of plastic that is not recycled, in the next 10 years the surface area of "junk soup" will double and become a threat not only to Hawaii, but to all countries of the Pacific Rim.

But in general, they try to “not notice” the problem. After all, the landfill does not look like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that enters here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can’t even imagine exactly how much rubbish can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from the satellite. Garbage can only be seen from the bow of the ship or diving into the water with scuba gear. But sea vessels they are not often in this area, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this section of the Pacific Ocean, known for that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific whirlpool is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is nobody's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage cycle with a living being: "It moves around the planet like a large animal off a leash." When this animal approaches land—and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case—the results are quite dramatic. "When a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered in plastic confetti," says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, rife with garbage, creates a danger to human health as well. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, the raw material of the plastics industry, are lost every year and end up in the sea over time. They pollute the environment by acting like chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. Then this dirt enters the stomachs along with food. "What goes into the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean dwellers and then on your plate. It's very simple"

The main ocean pollutants are China and India. It is considered in the order of things to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water. Below is a photo that does not make sense to comment.

A powerful North Pacific subtropical whirlpool is located here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio current, the northern trade wind currents and the intertrade countercurrents. The North Pacific whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where the most diverse rubbish has been carried for centuries from all over the world - algae, animal corpses, wood, shipwrecks. This is a real dead sea. Due to the abundance of rotting mass, the water in this area is saturated with hydrogen sulfide, so the North Pacific whirlpool is extremely poor in life - there are no large commercial fish, mammals, or birds. No one but zooplankton colonies. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here either, even military and merchant ships try to bypass this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the beginning of the 50s of the last century, plastic bags, bottles and packaging have been added to rotting algae, which, unlike algae and other organic matter, are poorly biodegradable and do not go anywhere. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 90 percent plastic, with a total mass six times that of natural plankton. Today, the area of all garbage patches exceeds even the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude.

similar island can also be found in the Sargasso Sea - this is part of the famous bermuda triangle. There used to be legends about an island of shipwrecks and masts that drifts in those waters, now the wooden debris has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we meet real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced annually in the world and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing every year faster and faster. And only you and I can stop their growth by abandoning plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made from biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to at least buy juice and water in glass containers or in tetra packs.

The garbage island has been talked about for more than half a century, but little action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being done to the environment, and entire species of animals are dying out. It is highly likely that there will come a time when nothing can be fixed.

Pollution has been around since the invention of plastic. On the one hand, an irreplaceable thing that has made life incredibly easier for people. She made it easier until the plastic product was thrown away: plastic decomposes for more than a hundred years, and thanks to ocean currents it gets lost in huge islands. One such island, larger than the US state of Texas, floats between California, Hawaii and Alaska - millions of tons of garbage. The island is growing rapidly, with ~2.5 million pieces of plastic and other debris dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean dwellers) suffer the most. Plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean kills more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these items, mistaking them for food.

Garbage Island has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the peculiarities of the North Pacific current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, at present, the mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and the area is more than a million square kilometers. The “island” has a number of unofficial names: “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Eastern Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, etc. In Russian it is sometimes called also a garbage iceberg. In 2001, the mass of plastic exceeded the mass of zooplankton in the island zone by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact, the largest dumping ground on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of undercurrents that have eddies. The "soup" strip stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California across the North Pacific past Hawaii and narrowly misses distant Japan.

The American oceanologist Charles Moore, the discoverer of this "great Pacific garbage patch", also known as the "garbage cycle", believes that about 100 million tons of floating rubbish are circling in this region. Markus Eriksen, director of science at Moore's Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), said yesterday: “Initially, people thought it was an island of plastic trash that you could almost walk on. This representation is inaccurate. The consistency of the stain is very similar to plastic soup. It is simply endless - in area, perhaps twice the size of the continental United States. The history of the discovery of the garbage patch by Moore is quite interesting:
14 years ago, young playboy and yachtsman Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to take a vacation in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to try out his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he swam into the trash.

But in general, they try to “not notice” the problem. After all, the landfill does not look like an ordinary island, in its consistency it resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that enters here sinks into the bottom layers, so we can’t even imagine exactly how much rubbish can accumulate there. Since the plastic is transparent and lies directly under the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from the satellite. Garbage can only be seen from the bow of the ship or diving into the water with scuba gear. But ships don't come to this area often, because since the days of the sailing fleet, all ship captains have laid routes away from this part of the Pacific Ocean, known for never having a wind. In addition, the North Pacific whirlpool is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is nobody's.

Oceanologist Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a leading authority on floating debris, has been monitoring the accumulation of plastic in the oceans for more than 15 years. He compares the garbage cycle with a living being: “It moves around the planet like a large animal off a leash.” When this animal approaches land—and in the case of the Hawaiian archipelago this is the case—the results are quite dramatic. “When a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered in this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.

The main ocean pollutants are China and India. It is considered in the order of things to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water.

A humpback whale entangled in plastic debris off the Canadian coast. According to the rescuers, the fishing line wrapped several times around the body and tail fin of the whale, seven or eight turns were around the left flipper and one passed through the animal's mouth. / Photo by the Provincetown Coastal Research Center.

Charles Moore returned home on a catamaran Alguita after participating in the regatta Transpac. He chose the path through the Hawaiian maximum ("horse latitudes") - an area of high atmospheric pressure in the Hawaiian Islands. This is a deserted and unpopular area with sailors.

In the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the coast, Moore began to notice debris. Every time Charles went on deck, he made a bet with himself that he would not see a piece of plastic, and every time he lost to himself. Bottles and caps, pieces of film, pieces of fishing nets - something was sure to float nearby. Moore took out a notebook and estimated the size of the sea dump. The captain watched the plastic overboard for seven days in a row, and Alguita during this time she traveled a thousand nautical miles. It turned out that the size of the littered area - about a thousand miles in diameter. This is how Charles Moore was introduced to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He was not a discoverer - the existence of the spot was predicted in 1988 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - but confirmed the prediction and drew attention to the problem.

Moore returned home and even after a few months he could not get the “plastic soup” out of his head. He began preparations for a second expedition to the "horse latitudes" to measure the amount of waste in the ocean. Two years later, he and a group of scientists from Institute of Marine Research Algalita (Algalita Marine Research and Education) managed to find out that on one square kilometer there are 334,721 pieces of plastic, and in many places the concentration of plastic exceeds the concentration of zooplankton by seven times. Since then, Moore hasn't left trash alone. He writes articles for scientific journals, makes a fuss in the media, speaks at conferences and, together with Institute of Marine Research Algalita talks about a huge ocean dump.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (BTMP) is not a floating garbage island. Once in its very center, you can not see anything. Satellites also fail to capture it. What is this spot that is not visible? The fact is that plastic does not decompose, like the usual organic waste, but photodegrades, that is, it decomposes under the action of sunlight and gradually crumbles into smaller and smaller pieces. These small particles are difficult to see from boats because they float below the surface, but if you take water samples, you can see that the ocean looks like pepper soup. Or, as Charles Moore says, "plastic soup."

When people talk about BTMP, they mean the accumulation of waste in the Eastern Pacific or the "Eastern Garbage Patch". The landfill is formed by the North Pacific current system: garbage enters the ocean, where it is picked up by water flows and gradually carried to the center, from where the currents are no longer released (therefore, the BTMP received a second name: “Pacific garbage whirlpool”). The spot is constantly replenished: abandoned fishing gear, abandoned ships, containers and cables get there, but land brings the bulk of the plastic. According to the report Greenpeace, 80% of the waste ends up in the garbage patch from land sources. Plastic is brought into the ocean not only from the beaches of coastal cities, but also from the depths of the continent - through rivers.

The size of the BTMP varies from article to article: someone claims that it is equal in area to two states of Texas, someone - that it is larger than the United States, but in fact the exact size of the garbage disposal is unknown. Individual expeditions of scientists simply cannot get enough samples to estimate the extent of the contaminated area. In addition, the water in the ocean is constantly moving under the influence of currents, so it is difficult to determine the clear boundaries of a marine landfill or accurately calculate the weight of garbage.

Who cares about plastic?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only marine dump, every ocean has its own smaller "copy". Therefore, instead of talking about the problems of BTMP, it is better to understand how garbage harms the ocean and how it interferes with people. There are three main problems: firstly, animals get entangled in garbage and get caught in forgotten fishing nets, secondly, they often confuse plastic with food and eat it, and thirdly, new species of living organisms enter the ocean along with plastic, and no one knows how this will affect the existing ecosystem.

Until the early fifties, fishermen and sailors used ropes made from natural hemp and cotton. They wore out over time and decomposed quickly if thrown into the ocean. Nowadays, fishing nets and ropes are made of durable synthetic materials, so they can rush through the waves and catch everyone in a row many years after they have been forgotten or lost. This is called "ghost fishing". Caught in abandoned nets or entangled in ropes, animals find themselves in an extremely unpleasant situation. In the worst case, those who fail to get out are doomed to drown, suffocate, starve to death, or become easy prey for predators; at best, suffer from pain while the bonds dig into the body, or drag kilometers of ropes behind them.

267 animal species around the world have ever been entangled in marine debris. This includes 86% of all sea turtle species, 44% of sea bird species, 60% of whale species and 100% of sea otter species. Threatened animals are also caught in fishing nets abandoned by people. In 2012, American scientists published an interesting study: they selected all available photographs of the endangered species of northern right whales, taken from 1980 to 2009, and checked for signs of entanglement in the photo (for example, scars from ropes). Of the 626 whales pictured, 519 were netted at least once, and 306 (59%) more often. In most cases active fishermen's traps were to blame, but 20% of the entanglements were caused by unidentified sources, and it can be assumed that this was marine debris.

To seriously injure the inhabitants of the oceans, it is not at all necessary to set up cunning traps, it is enough to throw a ring of packing tape into the sea. sea lions (a genus from the family of eared seals) of Alaska are not caught in the net, but in the so-called "garbage collars": a tape or rubber ring is wrapped around the neck or across the body and cuts into tissues, causing pain to the animal, which cannot free itself. The Alaska Department of Game and Fish has even launched a "Cut the Noose" campaign and is explaining to citizens that preventing misfortune and saving a seal is simple: just "defuse" the plastic ring before throwing it away. Other species also have their own "favorite" ways to get confused: fur seals get caught in scraps of nets, dolphins, turtles and birds - in a fishing line.

Unfortunately, it has not yet been possible to understand how much entanglement in waste harms populations as a whole. It is difficult to determine whether the animal fell into a forgotten or deliberately placed net, whether it suffered from ocean debris or from the tricks of fishermen. Finding captives in the ocean is difficult, scientists get most of the data from dead individuals, so the survival rate is unknown. But it is clear that even those who managed to get out can suffer serious injuries that prevent them from swimming, feeding and reproducing.

Garbage ingestion is a problem no less serious than entanglement. Plastic is eaten by animals of hundreds of species, in all shapes and sizes, on the surface and in the depths of the ocean. First, because waste often accumulates in feeding areas. And secondly, there are a lot of them: according to scientists, in 2010, from 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic got into the ocean. Filter-feeding animals and those that feed on silt swallow pieces of plastic in the process of feeding, and predators - if they managed not to gobble it up by mistake - get plastic with the bodies of victims.

Forty years ago, 74% of dead chicks of dark-backed albatrosses (Hawaii) found pieces of plastic in the intestines. Six years ago, scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) found that in the North Pacific, fish ingest between 12,000 and 24,000 tons of plastic per year. Garbage was tasted by all seven species of sea turtles and many invertebrates: crayfish, lobsters and sea cucumbers (the latter generally prefer plastic to their usual food).

Even if a piece of plastic is too big for marine life, over time it breaks down into fragments that can be swallowed. What the animals are trying to do: A team of scientists at the University of Hawaii at Hilo found in 2013 that 16% of garbage samples were attacked by fish, either confusing them for food or deliberately testing them for edibility.

Some pieces of plastic are so small that even zooplankton can swallow them. "Zooplankton" refers to microscopic animals that live near the surface of the ocean. Usually they feed on single-celled algae, but scientists have found out (and even filmed) that these little ones can easily confuse them with garbage. Zooplankton feeds on many animals (such as salmon and whales) and is at the very beginning of the food chain, so the plastic they eat will be passed further and further. At the other end of the chain there may be a person.

Not only is plastic difficult to digest, it can also absorb toxic substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dichlo(DDT), and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Some of them act as hormones in the cells of marine organisms, this leads to hormonal imbalance and affects the ability to bear children and mating behavior. For example, in seabirds, garbage eating can cause impaired steroid hormone production, delayed ovulation, and reproductive dysfunction.

Research on the impact of marine litter on animal health can easily be scary. If you eat anything, this can theoretically lead to starvation (as long as the stomach is full of plastic, you don’t want to eat), wounds, internal bleeding, ulceration, damage to the immune system and secondary infection. The longer the garbage remains in the digestive system, the greater the harmful effects on health. How long it takes to eliminate plastic from the body depends on the nature of the waste and on the physiology of the animal. For some species, the timing is already known: the garbage swallowed by the mollusk remains in the blood for more than six weeks, by the crab - longer than four, lobster - longer than two.

Miriam Goldstein, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in an interview with the publication IO9 noticed that scientists can only examine the stomach contents of dead albatrosses. “We are not going to kill the chicks to check the contents of their stomachs,” she added. Miriam said researchers have seen live fish with plastic in their stomachs. It is not clear whether these fish are malnourished or if they excrete garbage without any problems. The digestive systems of fish and birds are different, and it is possible that what harms one is harmless to others. So the authors of the latest study traditionally warn about the dangers of ingesting plastic, but admit that evidence for its effect on the health of seabirds is relatively scarce.

So for shouting "Trash is killing the ocean!" not enough reason yet. Moreover, some animals in plastic porridge breed, multiply and feel great. Bugs-water striders of the genus Halobates- the only insects that managed to master open ocean and, apparently, not without human help. Scientists have found that with the increase in the number of plastic particles in the past forty years, the number of individuals has also increased. Halobates sericeus in the Pacific Ocean. These insects spend their lives in the water, and in order to lay their eggs, they need floating objects - pieces of wood, feathers and shells. In 2002, during an expedition, researchers discovered 70,000 bedbug eggs. Halobates sobrinus on a four-liter plastic bottle - the insects quickly realized that plastic was also great for them, and began to multiply furiously.

water strider Halobates sericeus. Scientists suggest that large floating objects attract the attention of these insects and serve as a kind of "beacons" for individuals ready to mate.

While no one knows exactly what the invasion of hordes of water striders will lead to, but insect eggs are a favorite food of crabs and birds, so scientists assume that populations of these species will grow. But the zooplankton and caviar that the bugs feed on will become less. Researchers fear that the balance of the ecosystem will be upset, and organisms living on the surface will thrive at the expense of animals in the water column.

Plastic trash was nicknamed the "plastisphere" (by analogy with the biosphere) when it became known that every piece of plastic is densely populated with microbes. On fragments from Atlantic Ocean, ranging in size from 1 to 5 mm, scientists have more than a thousand species, among them were plants, consumers of plant foods and predators - a complete ecosystem. Microbes on pieces of plastic were genetically different from those that floated on natural objects- snags and feathers - and from those that lived in ocean water. Electron microscopes have shown that some micro-organisms nest in surface cracks, possibly contributing to the physical degradation of the plastic. Among the colonies of microbes, there were unexpectedly many bacteria of the genus Vibrio. Most Vibrio species are harmless, but some are pathogenic to fish, crustaceans, molluscs, or humans. Whether bacteria found on pieces of plastic can cause disease remains to be seen.

Garbage does not kill marine animals quickly and silently like ninjas, leaving a beautiful red streak on the water. It's changing the ocean - and we don't really understand how, and we can't predict exactly where it will lead. It's scary because humans are part of the ocean food chain, they depend on the existing ecosystem. That's why the pile of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and its little siblings makes you want to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Large ocean urn

Why not just clean up all that garbage? Because it is difficult, long and expensive.

If someone planned to clean up 1% of the North Pacific Ocean (which is a million square kilometers), rented a ship and worked 10 hours a day, passing at a speed of 20 km / h, he would need 67 ships a year. And it would cost from 122 to 489 million dollars - only for the lease of ships.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is very conveniently located far from coastlines of all states, so no one is in a hurry to take responsibility. Charles Moore claims that cleaning up the stain would ruin any country, and no one is going to test his hypothesis.

Scientists remind that although people cannot clean up the ocean dump, they can prevent new portions of plastic from getting there. The American "Committee for Ocean Protection" annually holds "International Shore Cleanup Day" - an international clean-up day, in which up to ninety countries take part. During the 25 years of this action, 65,592,401 kg of garbage have been removed from the beaches - and this is an impressive achievement, but it will not help to get rid of the waste that has already ended up in the ocean.

Bojan Slat, a 20-year-old inventor and innovator from the Netherlands, believes that every single piece of plastic will never be removed. But even at school, he thought about how to clean up the BTMP and whether problems could be turned into opportunities. The spot is constantly moving along with the current - why not take advantage of this? It would be possible to create an installation that the water currents themselves will carry where necessary.

Slat outlined his ideas on the popular conferences TEDx- and that didn't impress anyone. He tried to attract sponsors and contacted three hundred companies, but no one showed interest, and the project came to a standstill. A few months after Bojan Slat's speech, he began to receive 1,500 letters a day from people who wanted to help - someone very successfully shared a recording from the conference on the Internet. Slat seized the moment, founded a company The Ocean Cleanup and raised $80,000 through crowdfunding.

This is what the waste collection plant will look like The Ocean Cleanup.

Now it was necessary to check how well the idea was. To do this, a hundred scientists tried to answer fifty questions about oceanography, engineering, ecology, maritime law and finance. A year later, a calculation and analytical justification was published on five hundred pages with detailed description principles of operation of the treatment plant.

The facility that Slat and his team are proposing to build consists of a boom that traps the plastic and a platform where it enters. The barrier is attached to the bottom in such a way that marine animals and plankton can freely swim under it. Garbage is stopped at the boom and moved to the platform where it is collected by means of pumps (for small particles) and a conveyor (for medium ones). Then the water is pumped out of the plastic and crushed in a shredder. Garbage from the platform is taken out on a product tanker. Boyan Slat proposes to cover the costs of the project with the help of recycling: oil can be obtained from plastic.

Team ocean cleaning considered, it seems, all possible objections. Those who worry about the fate of the plankton are told that the animals will be able to swim under the barrier, and even if they die, the ocean will make up for the loss in seven seconds. In response to the question "How to dispose of waste from great depths? prove that most of the plastic is in the first three meters below the surface. To make sure the barrier is real life will collect garbage as well as in a computer simulation, ocean cleaning built a prototype and tested it near Azores and at the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam. Both experiments were successful.

At the end of August, the expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ended. Thirty vessels were collecting plastic samples to determine how much waste to remove in 2020, the final stage of the project. In 2016, Boyan Slat et al. will launch a purification plant into the open ocean near Tsushima Island for the first time. This pilot project will be 50 times smaller than what will be built for the Pacific spot - the length of the floating barrier is "only" 2300 meters.

At conferences, Slat warns that cleaning up the BTMP is only part of the solution. In order to really end plastic in the ocean, we need to stop the “garbage stream”. Waste recycling and coastal clean-up days are indispensable, even if the project ocean cleaning will turn out to be successful. “All we can do,” says Charles Moore, “is stop the pollution and give the ocean time to spit out the waste. Sooner or later he will be able to get rid of this rubbish if we give him a chance.”

A model for the formation of patches of debris in the Pacific Ocean, initially evenly distributed over the surface

NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Environmental scientists have conducted a detailed quantitative analysis of ocean plastic debris in one of the world's largest accumulations - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Based on the measurements, the scientists built a mathematical model with which they estimated the total mass of debris inside the spot, the area it occupies, and the size distribution. It turned out that previous studies underestimated the total mass of plastic in this area by about 4-16 times, scientists write in scientific reports.

Due to the configuration of ocean currents, large amounts of anthropogenic debris accumulate in some areas of the ocean. One such cluster is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located in the Pacific Ocean between the coast of California and Hawaiian Islands. The area of this accumulation is more than a million square kilometers, and accurate estimates of the total mass of floating debris (among which, for example, fishing nets, plastic bottles, fragments of buoys, ropes, films, various types of packaging) are this moment was not carried out. Some measurements made it possible only to estimate the minimum possible mass, which, taking into account various types of garbage, ranged from 5 to 20 thousand tons.

A team of scientists led by Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation measured the amount of different types of plastic debris in this area of the Pacific Ocean, and based on the data, ecologists modeled a garbage patch and estimated its total mass and area. Since 99.9 percent of all debris on the ocean surface is plastic, as the main data source for the model, scientists used measurements of the content of four types of plastic debris in a patch of different sizes: microplastics (from 0.05 to 0.5 centimeters in size), mesoplasty (from 0.5 to 5 centimeters), macroplasty (from 5 to 50 centimeters) and megaplasty (more than 50 centimeters).

The measurements were carried out from July to September 2015. A total of 652 measurements were taken at various points in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The number of large pieces of the largest debris, scientists also estimated by surveying the surface of the ocean from an aircraft. Based on the collected data, a mathematical model was built, which made it possible to calculate the mass, area and size distribution of garbage in the spot.

Numerical Simulation Results of the Total Mass of Plastic Debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The results of the calculations showed that the garbage patch contains approximately 80 thousand tons of plastic, which in total cover an area of about 1.6 million square kilometers. This mass is about 4 times the maximum from previous estimates and 16 times the value obtained from previous measurements of the amount of garbage collected in trawl nets.

The results of measurements of the mass of garbage of various sizes. The line marks the boundary of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

L. Lebreton et al./ Scientific Reports, 2018

In addition to the total mass of plastic in the garbage patch, scientists analyzed its fractional composition. It turned out that more than three-quarters of all objects in the spot are more than 50 centimeters in size, and almost half of the spot consists of elements of fishing nets. At the same time, for example, the content of the smallest microplastic garbage (mainly, these are individual elements, fragments and scraps of other types of garbage) is only about eight percent of all garbage by weight, but at the same time, 94 percent if we count the garbage by the piece (total in a spot approximately 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic waste).

At the same time, the mass of microplastic waste has increased significantly over last years: if in the 1970s, for every square kilometer of the ocean surface inside the garbage patch, on average, there were about 0.4 kilograms of microplastics, then by 2015 this mass had more than tripled: up to 1.23 kilograms.

Compared to previous measurements, scientists attribute the differences both to the refinement of analysis methods, and directly to the increase in the amount of garbage over the time elapsed between studies. One of the possible natural causes of the increase in the amount of plastic, scientists also call a large tsunami caused by an earthquake near east coast Honshu Island in 2011.

At the same time, it turned out that the accumulation of plastic in a garbage patch is exponential and this process is faster than if new garbage appeared only due to ocean currents. The results, according to the authors of the study, should help to understand the exact mechanisms of the increase in the mass of plastic debris and develop ways to combat its consequences.

To understand the mechanisms by which islands are formed in the ocean from debris or other passively floating objects (for example, colonies of various bioorganisms), scientists often have to use rather complex physical models based on hydrodynamic approaches or the kinetic theory of gases. For example, using one of these methods, scientists find that the debris drift process consists of two main stages: first, small objects form into clusters, after which these clusters slowly diverge from each other.

Alexander Dubov