Pacific Trash Gyre

Like the falcons turning and turning in a widening gyre in William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” common plastic, perhaps as much as three million tons, swirls in a Pacific Ocean gyre.

Dubbed the Pacific Trash Vortex, plastic, floats, bobs and semi-sinks in this stagnant part of the sea that is wind-starved and hard to escape. Currents propel the colorful flotsam until it reaches this part of the sea known as the doldrums, a place sailors avoid. Once in it, the North Pacific Sub-Tropical Gyre goes round and round in an area twice the size of Texas, the southern tip perhaps five hundred miles north of Honolulu. The gyre, like gravity, does not release easily.

Run-off from the Ganges River in India, the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles and a thousand other rivers and beaches in North America and Asia feed the trash vortex with a steady diet of billions and billions of pounds of plastic each year that it devours but cannot digest.

Petroleum based plastics do not bio-degrade, they photo-degrade into smaller and smaller pieces. Every piece of this type of plastic still exists. Approximately 95 per cent of the world’s annual 300 billion pound pre-production plastic is petroleum based.

Plastic from as far back as the 1940’s, when this miracle material’s modern epoch began, tricks birds and fish, luring them in with a myriad of color, replicating something like their favorite meal, choking many and poisoning most, leaving a wake of death behind.

In 2003, Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation of Los Angeles sailed through the gyre and wrote, “I was confronted as far as the eye could see with the sight of plastic.”

Moore recently sampled seawater inside the vortex and found that for every six pounds of plastic, only one pound of naturally growing plankton occurred.

Moore has been studying the Northern Fulmars, a bird like the albatross that spends most of its life at sea.. They are washing ashore in the Pacific Islands dead and full of plastic at an alarming rate. Petroleum based plastics are high in PCB’s, a toxin that enters the food chain and effects the hormonal structure of all that consume it.

“The actual ability to wipe out the entire vertebrate kingdom in the ocean is with the plastic particles,” Moore said.

Curt Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, who specializes in ocean flotsam, recently sorted through the stomach of a dead albatross on the island of Guam. Cigarette lighters, bottle caps and hundreds of other plastics were found in its belly including a war relic; a Bakelite tag from a WWII US Navy patrol that’s been floating for sixty years.

Ebbesmeyer said, “If you could fast forward 10,000 years and do an archeological dig, a core sample down through the beach, you'd find a little line of plastic," he says. "What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren't able to reproduce. They didn't last very long because they killed themselves.”

And Yeats, who predicted a calamity in his poem that would spawn the “second coming” probably never thought it would be an every day material.