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 |

COMMENTS

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!

Date: Apr 22 2008 03:26:14 PM Author: Zandy Miller Thanks for publishing this information. It really helped bring the message home, at least to me anyway. Subject: Good shit Date: Mar 18 2008 01:52:45 AM Author: likes bands and swearing too I love that you publish stuff like this. Subject: Dice Date: Mar 07 2008 02:04:19 PM Author: Manny Cucuro What gives you the impression that Andrew "Dice" Clay was a whaleophobe? Subject: - Date: Feb 29 2008 12:29:31 PM Author: c. james I did a 20 page term paper on the garbage patch for a social movements class not too long ago. weird to see it on vice, where trendy fuckers can pretend to care or not care, either way. anyways, the ocean is fucked in more ways than just litter, check out red tides and the awesome amount of jellyfish growing because of it. and how all the reefs of the world are dead or dying. or how the ocean's chemical balance is fucked because of us. Subject: Hrm. Date: Feb 28 2008 12:10:02 PM Author: Me again. So this why I'm 25 and have already gotten cancer! Lovely. I'll just keep my port in for the rest of my life for ease of use... you know, for when I inevitably get cancer AGAIN because of this nonsense. Subject: ; Date: Feb 28 2008 08:59:22 AM Author: ; it's not at all possible that time may have somehow lapsed between the initial idea, the trip, the writing and the publishing? i hope you at least got something out of the photos you got from the fucking radio. Subject: You Got Scooped By Ira Glass Date: Feb 28 2008 07:20:08 AM Author: John Vice is now reporting on things that This American Life made into kitschy radio fare two months ago? Subject: fuck you dupont Date: Feb 27 2008 11:15:03 PM Author: don't listen to the scientists if you think the ocean is fucked you should take a road trip through middle of nowhere midwest usa. the lab i did my undergrad research in used to get regular phone calls from certain chemical companies. these companies would base their waste dumping on their projections of our research progress. Subject: Dice Date: Feb 27 2008 11:01:20 PM Author: Beef I was listening to Dice as I read this. Subject: ? Date: Feb 27 2008 09:42:22 PM Author: Me. Who is the adorable bespectacled eco-boy and why am I not married to him? Subject: eat shit and die already Date: Feb 27 2008 08:51:34 PM Author: stupid kid Hey humans, eat shit and die already. Subject: Mon aventures sous la mer Date: Feb 27 2008 08:48:43 PM Author: Jacques Cousteau do you really need the staff at Vice to inform you about pollution? I mean, in theory it's a good idea for a topic but COME ON...I only come here for the articles on obscure indie bands, excessive swearing and decent photog. yeah I can rant too, so WHAT Subject: A satisfied reader!!! Date: Feb 27 2008 08:08:23 PM Author: Johnny Cocaine This is why I love VICE! Keep up the great work! Subject: such a shame Date: Feb 27 2008 08:06:53 PM Author: lame yea, we suck Subject: Ocean Junk opens March 2008 NYC Date: Feb 27 2008 06:15:29 PM Author: stupid kid They should take some of that trash back to New York and sell it in a trendy upscale boutique called "Ocean Junk," or something. All the wealthy new condo owners can put it on their book shelves or hang it on their walls and marvel at it's tragic existence, while they dine on pre-packaged plastic wrapped food they bought at the store and then will throw away in their dumpster which then somebody will go put on a boat which will fall out of the boat and end up in the gyre and then this guy can go back on another salvage mission and then eventually sell it back to them. Ha ha. Subject: __ Date: Feb 27 2008 05:05:21 PM Author: answer if it's the size of goddamned Texas how come I haven't seen it on any satellite maps of the world? For the same reason you can't make out individual blades of grass in satellite shots of the real Texas--it's not a contiguous mass, just a really big section of open water filled with millions of tiny pieces of crap. Subject: ... Date: Feb 27 2008 04:59:58 PM Author: Hansen Great topic for an article, Vice. I look forward to reading the rest of it. Subject: satellite Date: Feb 27 2008 04:57:09 PM Author: Eric J I'm not calling bullshit or anything, but if it's the size of goddamned Texas how come I haven't seen it on any satellite maps of the world? Subject: zap Date: Feb 27 2008 04:10:27 PM Author: zap One day the world will go...BOOM...AND SO WILL THAT TINY INSIGNIFICANT MAN ON THE BOAT. dont pretend to care...we all know that when you had finished the pictures you dumped it back in the sea. xx Subject: ugh Date: Feb 27 2008 03:45:18 PM Author: ugh way to go, world