OH, THIS IS GREAT - PART 1Humans Have Finally Ruined the Ocean
TEXT BY THOMAS MORTON,
PHOTOS BY JAKE BURGHART
I’m not one of those guys who corners folks at parties to rant at them about biodiesel or calls people “fucking idiots” for being skeptical about global warming. But I should also point out that I’m not one of those Andrew Dice Clay “Fuck the whales” types either.
The problem with all the bravado on both sides of the ecology debate is that nobody really knows what they’re talking about. Trying to form opinions on climate change, overpopulation, and peak oil hinges on ginormous leaps of faith based around tiny statistical deviances that even the scientists studying them have a hard time understanding. It gets so convoluted with all the yelling and the politics that sometimes you just want something huge and incontrovertibly awful to come along for everybody to agree on. Something you can show anyone a picture of and go, “See? We’re fucked.”
Well, I have just such a thing. There is a Texas-size section of the Pacific Ocean that is irretrievably clogged with garbage and it will never go away. And I have seen it with my own eyes. Case closed. Oh, you want to hear more? OK, fine.
In the middle of the 90s, Charles Moore was sailing his racing catamaran back to California from Hawaii and decided on a lark to cut through the center of the North Pacific Gyre. The Gyre is an enormous vortex of currents revolving around a continuous high-pressure zone—if you think of the rest of the Pacific as a gigantic toilet, this zone would be the part where your poop bobs and twirls before being sucked down. Boats typically avoid it since it’s essentially one big windless death trap, so when Moore motored through it was just him, his crew, and an endless field of garbage.
As long as it’s existed, the middle of the Gyre has been a naturally occurring point of accumulation for all the drifting crap in its half of the ocean. Once upon a time, flotsam circled into the middle of the Gyre and (because up until the past century everything in the world was biodegradable) was broken down into a nutrient-rich stew perfect for fish and smaller invertebrates to chow on. Then we started making everything out of plastic and the whole place went to shit.
The problem with plastic is, unless you hammer it with enough pressure to make a diamond, it never fully disintegrates. Over time plastic will photodegrade all the way down to the individual polymers, but those little guys are still in it for the long haul. This means that except for the slim handful of plastics designed specifically to biodegrade, every synthetic molecule ever made still exists. And except for the small percentage that gets caught in a net or washes up on a shore, every chunk of plastic that’s dropped into the Pacific makes its way to the center of the Gyre and is floating there right now.
After watching junk lap against the side of his boat for the better part of a week, Captain Moore decided to convert his boat into a research vessel and make semiannual trips into the Gyre to study the trash. I tagged along on his most recent voyage, joining a divorced, 40-something doctor and a Mexican chemist and mother of two as his crew. It was like a family vacation, but with more science and way more bummers.
The garbage patch is located at one of the most remote points on earth. It takes a solid week of sailing just to get there. Considering how torturous the average daylong car trip gets, you can well imagine the kind of zap job that seven days on a 50-foot boat will do to your brain. You lose sight of land the first day, then you stop seeing other ships, then you stop seeing anything at all except for endless waves and occasionally a seabird, which, after days of nothing but water, becomes as exciting as spotting a UFO. Right at the point where you’ve come up with a separate song for every bird in the ship’s guidebook and have begun integrating them into a full seabird opera, you start seeing the trash.
 I had assumed (completely without any basis in research or common sense) that there was some contiguous mass of concentrated garbage the captain was steering us toward, but (sadly?) this was not the case. The debris patterns shift with the currents, so you just have to aim the boat in one direction and hope for crap. Every so often we’d spot a few different pieces of garbage floating sort of near one another, but for the most part it was just a steady stream of junk, passing one piece at a time. It was a little underwhelming at first, but keep in mind we were cutting a razor-thin course through one of the biggest expanses of open water on the planet. The fact that we couldn’t look out the window for the better part of the trip without seeing some piece of junk bobbing by holds some seriously ugly implications for the rest of the ocean.
The first few times we spotted garbage, we made a big production of stopping the boat and going out to scoop it up. Then we began just picking up whatever trash we could snag from the front of the deck. Then we just grabbed whatever looked interesting.
TO BE CONTINUED
OH, THIS IS GREAT | 1 | 2 |
Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote:
Whatever happened to Perfect Science Super-Ayanized Water? THat was supposed to be the answer to everything and now the consipracy theory begins... | | Anonymous, on May 28, 2009 wrote:
Hey dude , Let’s drop a nuke in there and burn it all up! Just don’t eat the fish that glow! Just Kidding! That’s the kind of stuff some butt head will come up with, as a fix, autoincenterate It’s only as big as Texas! Hey we Can Blow that crap up, we’ll get blow shit up and save the planet at the same time! COOL DUDE! LITE the Fuse Man And o’yea Pass me that Joint! This is going to be Awsome! | | Anonymous, on May 16, 2009 wrote:
and on the land happens the same | | Anonymous, on Apr 12, 2009 wrote:
Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2008 wrote:
"Im horrified at this!=0 Something needs to be done, anything! We need to put this on the news, or in the paper, anything to catch peoples attention to show them what we are doing to the earth"
You are a giant, massive douche. | | Anonymous, on Nov 24, 2008 wrote:
Dude... Seriously... | | Anonymous, on Oct 29, 2008 wrote:
The only way I can see this being fixable is to bioengineer several types of bacteria that feed on vast quantities of non-biodegradable polymers, and break them down into inert, bio-friendly substances. Otherwise, in order to ’clean’ the oceans, we’d have to scoop up billions of trillions of tons of solids and liquids, centrifuge the hell out of them, remove the garbage and chemical pollutants, boil what’s left, and dump it into the ocean again.
Of course, bioengineered bacteria will probably cause horrific problems of their own, so basically, yes, barring time-travel (and teaching people in the 1800s how to make bio-friendly plastics), we’re probably screwed. | | Anonymous, on Oct 24, 2008 wrote:
Assuming you’re not just making a shitty joke, you realize it’s completely impossible to trawl the whole ocean, right? What are you going to do, remove all the fish and plankton from each section as yo do them? | | Anonymous, on Oct 24, 2008 wrote:
This is not so hard to solve. Just eliminate the federal military budget and devote hundreds of billions to trawling the oceans picking up trash. Would be an excellent and worthy use of my taxpayer dollars. | | Anonymous, on Oct 7, 2008 wrote:
I think most of you are missing the point. It really shows the stupidity of humanity. | | Anonymous, on Sep 25, 2008 wrote:
So there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about all this shit floating in the ocean? If so, we’re boned.
You’d think that the same people who put a man on the moon and is now trying to put one on Mars would be able to figure out how to throw away their dirty tissues. | | Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2008 wrote:
Im horrified at this!=0 Something needs to be done, anything! We need to put this on the news, or in the paper, anything to catch peoples attention to show them what we are doing to the earth | | Anonymous, on Sep 4, 2008 wrote:
I am pretty sure you wouldn’t eat any thing whales eat... | | Anonymous, on Sep 4, 2008 wrote:
It seems to me, mother earth had buried most of the toxins, like, oil and poison. Had left good things, like, fruit trees and fresh water, within our reach. | | Anonymous, on Sep 1, 2008 wrote:
Thanks a lot for doing the doc, I think a lot of people needed to see it or at least I can say it definitely opened my eyes and gave me an argument to convince ppl to use less plastic. | | Anonymous, on Aug 19, 2008 wrote:
FUCK THESE FAT FUCKEN WHALES EATING ALL MY MOTHERFUCKEN FOOD. FUCK YOU DICKBAG WHALES. DIE MOTHERFUCKERS. BADA BING! | | Anonymous, on Aug 17, 2008 wrote:
Capitalists 1 Earth 0 | | Anonymous, on Jul 31, 2008 wrote:
WALL-E | | Anonymous, on Jul 30, 2008 wrote:
Wow. Only pseudo-comments, subject-avoiding comments, pretentious comments, discrediting-attempt comments, devious comments.
Which one’s the trash anyway? | | Anonymous, on Jul 28, 2008 wrote:
Please go to your local thrift store & buy used ceramic of plastic containers, & when you go out to buy your fish, meat etc, please let the deli/fish monger know first that you are using your container.
When you order take out, please don’t order delivery & please bring these same containers to your restaurant of choice & before ordering explain that you would like your food in these containers.
when you go grocery shopping, please bring cotton net bags for your apples & most of your vegetables & tomatoes, etc.
Try to avoid buying food that comes in a plastic bag--
Do buy food that ( rare to find but starting to happen ) is being sold in completely biodegradable sometimes rice wrappers & also recycled paper & plastic in order to support the industries that are trying to solve the problem..
The result??
You will probably eat better, stay trim, save a little money, learn how to cook & unload a great deal of bad karma.. Also please quit smoking, for obvious reasons- butts.. I might have run out of room long ago, but do these things.. There is much more to do, go to thrift stores i another.. | | Anonymous, on Jul 21, 2008 wrote:
That’s great and all with the fragmentation, but what about all the trash coming from Asia? From what I’ve read it makes up anywhere from half to two-thirds of the mess. | | Anonymous, on Jul 20, 2008 wrote:
Most North Americans are force-fed the most trite forms of pragmatism and extreme individualism which keeps them in a perpetual state of dysconsciousness and socio-ecological fragmentation--thus they lack a sense of phenomenology and cannot conceive of a hoilistic future vision in a shared ecosystem.
--Razanarchsita
my email is:
razanarchista@lycos.com | | Anonymous, on Jul 15, 2008 wrote:
RE:Date: Feb 28 2008 07:20:08 AM
Author: John
It’s growing and it is not about being the first to notice it, its trendy hacks like you that make this crap more dribble and let mainstreamers ignore. it’s about doing something! | | |
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