The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge accumulation of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean. The slick is made up of plastic and other man-made waste that was picked up by a gyre current in the North Pacific Ocean. Despite its size and significant density, the spot is not visible on satellite photographs because it consists of small particles. In addition, most of the garbage floats in a slightly submerged state, hiding under water.

The existence of a garbage continent was theoretically predicted back in 1988. The forecast was based on data collected in Alaska between 1985 and 1988. A study of the amount of drifting plastic in the surface waters of the North Pacific Ocean found that a lot of debris accumulates in areas subject to certain ocean currents. Data from the Sea of ​​Japan led the researchers to speculate that similar accumulations could be found in other parts of the Pacific Ocean, where prevailing currents contribute to the formation of relatively calm water surfaces. In particular, scientists pointed to the North Pacific Current System. A few years later, the existence of a huge garbage patch was documented by Charles Moore, a Californian captain and marine explorer. While sailing through the North Pacific Current system after participating in a regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the ocean surface. Captain Moore reported his discovery to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who subsequently named the area the Eastern Garbage Continent. The existence of a garbage patch attracted the attention of the public and scientific circles after the publication of several articles by Charles Moore. Since then, the Great Garbage Patch has been considered the largest example of human pollution in the marine environment.

Like other areas of the world's oceans with high levels of trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was formed by ocean currents that gradually concentrated trash thrown into the ocean into one area. The Garbage Patch occupies a large, relatively stable area in the northern Pacific Ocean, bounded by the North Pacific Current System (an area often referred to as the "horse latitudes", or calm latitudes). The system's vortex collects debris from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters of North America and Japan. The waste is picked up by surface currents and gradually moves to the center of the whirlpool, which does not release the waste beyond its boundaries.

The exact size of the large spot is unknown. It is impossible to estimate its size from aboard a ship, and the spot is not visible from an airplane. We can glean most of the information about the garbage patch only from theoretical calculations. Estimates of its area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of ​​the Pacific Ocean). There are probably over one hundred million tons of trash in this area. It is also suggested that the garbage continent consists of two combined areas.

According to Charles Moore's calculations, 80% of the debris in the slick comes from land-based sources, and 20% is thrown from the decks of ships on the high seas. Moore says waste from the east coast of Asia travels to the center of the vortex in about five years, and from the west coast of North America in a year or less.

A garbage patch is not a continuous layer of debris floating on the surface itself. Degraded plastic particles are mostly too small to be seen visually. To roughly estimate the density of pollution, scientists examine water samples. In 2001, scientists (including Moore) found that in certain areas of the garbage patch, the concentration of plastic was already reaching a million particles per square mile. There were 3.34 pieces of plastic per square meter with an average weight of 5.1 milligrams. In many places in the contaminated region, the total concentration of plastic was seven times higher than the concentration of zooplankton. In samples taken at greater depths, the level of plastic waste was found to be significantly lower (mainly fishing lines). Thus, previous observations were confirmed that most plastic waste accumulates in the upper water layers.

Some plastic particles resemble zooplankton, and jellyfish or fish may mistake them for food. Large amounts of hard-to-degrade plastic (bottle caps and rings, disposable lighters) end up in the stomachs of seabirds and animals, in particular sea turtles and black-footed albatrosses.

Thus, humanity has once again created a problem for itself. Much plastic decomposes very slowly. For example, the biological decomposition of polyethylene takes about two hundred years; polyvinyl chloride releases unsafe products when decomposed. Activities are planned to clean up the ocean surface using flotillas of specially equipped ships, but this is difficult to implement in practice, and, in addition, the collected garbage still needs to be processed. If we cannot solve the problem, we should not at least aggravate it. The first thing to do is to reduce the amount of waste entering the ocean and increase the production of packaging made from biodegradable plastics.

December 2, 2014 at 5:22 pm

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Prevent Planetary Pollution

• Popular Science

Probably few people have heard of this phenomenon, but this is not surprising. The human race tends to easily forget our mistakes and sweep rubbish under the rug. So, about garbage - did you know that there is a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Eastern Garbage Continent, also known as the Pacific Garbage Patch? This is an accumulation of garbage in the North Pacific Ocean. Garbage created, naturally, by people. In ancient times, the ocean seemed endless, it was impossible to overcome it in a few days' journey, so distant shores and waters were always inhabited by various monsters. Those times have passed, there are only a few white spots left, but it still seems to humanity that their planet is so huge that it will endure any treatment.

Many scientists are sounding the alarm, calling for a reduction in CO 2 emissions, which, in their opinion, lead to the greenhouse effect and global warming, which threatens to flood many coastal regions with water from the melted poles. Others report the problem of putting satellites into orbit due to the huge amount of debris and spent satellites of the old generation that have accumulated there. But few pay attention to another danger - the world’s oceans are practically unable to cope with the millions of tons of plastic waste that have been accumulating there for the last fifty years.

This problem was first predicted back in 1988 by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States. And the fact of the existence of a garbage patch was made public by Charles Moore, a California navy captain and oceanographer, whose articles described this phenomenon. While sailing through the North Pacific Current system after participating in a regatta, Moore discovered a huge accumulation of debris on the ocean surface. He reported his discovery to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who later named the area the "Eastern Trash Continent."

The spot is formed by established currents that swirl around a certain area. Its exact size is unknown. Approximate estimates of the area vary from 700 thousand to 15 million km² or more (from 0.41% to 8.1% of the total area of ​​the Pacific Ocean). There are probably over one hundred million tons of trash in this area. It is known that plastic decomposes very poorly; in the ocean it simply floats close to the surface, gradually breaking down physically and breaking into small fragments, but without degrading chemically.

Ocean animals eat pieces of plastic, confusing it with plankton, and thus it is included in the food chain - unless the animals die of suffocation or starvation after eating plastic. In addition to directly harming animals, floating waste can absorb organic pollutants from the water, including PCBs, DDT, and PAHs. Some of these substances are not only toxic - their structure is similar to the hormone estradiol, which leads to hormonal imbalance in the poisoned animal. The consequences of these phenomena, how they will affect the ecosystem as a whole and people in particular, are not yet fully understood.

Unfortunately, there is neither international recognition of the problem (at the same level as, for example, an agreement to limit CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere), nor proven technologies for cleaning the ocean from pollution. In 2008, Richard Owen, a diving instructor, founded the Environmental Cleanup Coalition (ECC), which deals with pollution problems in the North Pacific Ocean. The ECC organization is calling for the formation of a fleet of ships to clear the waters and the opening of a Gyre Island waste processing laboratory.

In 2009, the 5 Gyres Institute was founded by oceanographer Dr. Marcus Eriksen and his wife Anna Cummins. The Institute studies the problems of pollution of the World Ocean, already discovered garbage patches, and also looks for new ones.

In 2014, a group of scientists, with the support of National Geographic, spent nine months scouring the oceans, collecting information about ocean pollution and creating a “plastic” map of the ocean.

In 2014, 19-year-old Boyan Slat, a student at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, introduced a system for cleaning up ocean debris with autonomous platforms that float freely in the ocean and catch debris using floating barriers. Three years earlier, Slat had been diving off the coast of Greece and became excited by the fact that there were more bags floating in the Mediterranean than jellyfish. He decided to devote his life to solving the problem of cleaning the ocean, and together with a team of like-minded people, he conducted a comprehensive study and raised more than $2 million through crowdfunding to continue the work.

Their method uses natural ocean currents and winds to passively carry debris toward a collection platform. Solid floating barriers are then used to catch and concentrate debris from the ocean, eliminating the risk of entanglement for fish and other creatures that occurs with other debris collection methods such as nets. Although the method is not cheap (it requires about 32 million euros per year), it is many times cheaper than other proposed cleaning methods.

The Ocean Cleanup is constantly accepting donations and volunteers. In November, the organization put together a second

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, “Pacific Trash Vortex”, “North Pacific Gyre”, “Pacific Garbage Island”, whatever they call this giant island of garbage, which is growing at a gigantic pace. There has been talk about garbage island for more than half a century, but virtually no action has been taken. Meanwhile, irreparable damage is being caused to the environment, and entire species of animals are becoming extinct. There is a high probability that a moment will come when nothing can be fixed. So, read more about the problem of ocean pollution below

Pollution started from the time plastic was invented. On the one hand, it is an irreplaceable thing that has made people's lives incredibly easier. It makes it easier until the plastic product is thrown away: plastic takes more than a hundred years to decompose, and thanks to ocean currents it gathers into 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 being dumped into the ocean every day from all continents. Slowly decomposing, plastic causes serious harm to the environment. Birds, fish (and other ocean creatures) suffer the most. Plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean is responsible for the death of more than a million seabirds a year, as well as more than 100 thousand marine mammals. Syringes, lighters and toothbrushes are found in the stomachs of dead seabirds - birds swallow all these objects, mistaking them for food

"Trash Island" has been growing rapidly since about the 1950s due to the characteristics of the North Pacific Current system, the center of which, where all the garbage ends up, is relatively stationary. According to scientists, the current mass of the garbage island is more than three and a half million tons, and its 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 area by six times.

This huge pile of floating garbage - in fact the largest landfill on the planet - is held in one place by the influence of underwater currents that have turbulence. The swath of "soup" stretches from a point about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the North Pacific Ocean, past Hawaii and just shy of distant Japan.

American oceanographer Charles Moore, the discoverer of this “great Pacific garbage patch,” also known as the “garbage gyre,” believes that about 100 million tons of floating trash are circling in this region. Marcus Eriksen, director of science at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (USA), founded by Moore, said yesterday: "People initially thought it was an island of plastic waste that you could almost walk on. This idea is inaccurate. The consistency of the slick is very similar to soup made of plastic. It's just endless - perhaps twice the size of the continental United States." The story of Moore's discovery of the garbage patch is quite interesting:
14 years ago, a young playboy and yachtsman, Charles Moore, the son of a wealthy chemical magnate, decided to relax in the Hawaiian Islands after a session at the University of California. At the same time, Charles decided to test his new yacht in the ocean. To save time, I swam straight ahead. A few days later, Charles realized that he had sailed into the trash heap.

“For a week, every time I went on deck, plastic junk floated past,” Moore wrote in his book Plastics are Forever? “I couldn’t believe my eyes: how could we pollute such a huge area of ​​water?” 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 film a new film in Hawaii, almost had a heart attack at the sight of these mountains of garbage. However, plastic has not only ruined the lives of vacationers, but also led to the death of some birds and sea turtles. Since then, Moore's name has not left the pages of American media. Last week, AMRF's founder warned that unless consumers limit their use of non-recyclable plastic, the surface area of ​​the "garbage soup" will double in the next 10 years, threatening not only Hawaii but the entire Pacific Rim.

But in general, they try to “ignore” the problem. The landfill does not look like an ordinary island; its consistency resembles a “soup” - fragments of plastic float in the water at a depth of one to hundreds of meters. In addition, more than 70 percent of all plastic that gets here ends up in the bottom layers, so we don’t even know exactly how much trash can accumulate there. Since plastic is transparent and lies directly below the surface of the water, the “polyethylene sea” cannot be seen from a satellite. Debris can only be seen from the bow of a ship or when scuba diving. But sea vessels rarely visit 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 the fact that there is never wind here. In addition, the North Pacific Gyre is neutral waters, and all the garbage that floats here is no one'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 dump cycle to a living creature: “It moves around the planet like a large animal let 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. “As soon as a garbage patch burps, the whole beach is covered in this plastic confetti,” says Ebbesmeyer.

According to Eriksen, the slowly circulating mass of water, replete with debris, poses a risk to human health. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets - the raw material of the plastics industry - are lost every year and eventually end up in the sea. They pollute the environment by acting as chemical sponges that attract man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. This dirt then enters the stomachs along with food. "What ends up in the ocean ends up in the stomachs of the ocean's inhabitants, and then on your plate. It's very simple."

The main ocean polluters are China and India. Here it is considered common practice to throw garbage directly into a nearby body of water. Below is a photo that makes no sense to comment..

There is a powerful North Pacific subtropical eddy here, formed at the meeting point of the Kuroshio Current, northern trade wind currents and inter-trade wind countercurrents. The North Pacific Whirlpool is a kind of desert in the World Ocean, where a wide variety of rubbish - algae, animal corpses, wood, ship wrecks - has been carried away for centuries from all over the world. 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, no mammals, no birds. No one except colonies of zooplankton. Therefore, fishing vessels do not come here, even military and merchant ships try to avoid this place, where high atmospheric pressure and fetid calm almost always reign.

Since the early 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 subject to biological decay processes and do not disappear 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 even exceeds the territory of the United States! Every 10 years, the area of ​​this colossal landfill increases by an order of magnitude

A similar island can be found in the Sargasso Sea - it is part of the famous Bermuda Triangle. Previously, there were legends about an island made from the wreckage of ships and masts, which drifts in those waters, now the wooden wreckage has been replaced by plastic bottles and bags, and now we encounter real garbage islands. According to Green Peace, more than 100 million tons of plastic products are produced worldwide each year, and 10% of them end up in the world's oceans. Garbage islands are growing faster and faster every year. And only you and I can stop their growth by giving up plastic and switching to reusable bags and bags made of biodegradable materials. At the very least, try to buy juice and water in glass containers or in tetra bags.

A humpback whale becomes entangled in plastic debris off the Canadian coast. Rescuers said the fishing line wrapped several times around the whale's body and tail fin, with seven or eight wraps around the whale's left flipper and one through the animal's mouth. / Photo by Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies.

Charles Moore was returning home on a catamaran Alguita after participating in the regatta Transpac. He chose a path through the Hawaiian Maximum (“horse latitudes”) - an area of ​​​​high atmospheric pressure in the area of ​​​​the Hawaiian Islands. This is a deserted and unpopular area among sailors.

In the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from shore, Moore began to notice garbage. Every time Charles went out on deck, he made a bet with himself that he would not see a single piece of plastic, and each 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 notepad and estimated the size of the sea dump. The captain observed 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 was about a thousand miles in diameter. This is how Charles Moore became acquainted with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He was not the discoverer - the existence of the spot was predicted in 1988 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - but he confirmed the prediction and drew attention to the problem.

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

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GGP) is not a floating garbage island. Finding yourself in the very center of it, you may not be able to see anything. Satellites also fail to photograph it. What is this spot that is not visible? The fact is that plastic does not decompose like conventional organic waste, but photodegrades, that is, it disintegrates under the influence 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 part of the Pacific Ocean or the “Eastern Garbage Patch”. The landfill is formed by the North Pacific current system: garbage falls into the ocean, where it is picked up by water flows and gradually carried to the center, from where the currents no longer release it (therefore, the BTMP received a second name: “Pacific garbage vortex”). The spot is constantly replenished: abandoned fishing gear, abandoned ships, containers and cables end up there, but the bulk of the plastic comes from land. According to the report Greenpeace, 80% of waste ends up in the garbage patch from land-based 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: some claim that it is equal in area to two states of Texas, others claim 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 obtain enough samples to be able to assess the extent of the contaminated area. In addition, 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 landfill at sea; every ocean has its own smaller replica. Therefore, instead of talking about the problems of BTMP, it is better to understand how garbage harms the ocean and how it bothers people. There are three main problems: firstly, animals get entangled in garbage and are caught in forgotten fishing nets, secondly, they often confuse plastic with food and eat it, and thirdly, new species of living organisms end up in 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 quickly decomposed if left in the ocean. Nowadays, fishing nets and ropes are made from durable synthetic materials, so they can float across the waves and catch everyone long 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. At worst, those who fail to escape are doomed to drown, suffocate, starve, or become easy prey for predators; at best, they suffer pain while the bonds dig into their bodies, or drag kilometers of ropes behind them.

267 species of animals around the world have become entangled in marine debris at some time. This includes 86% of all sea turtle species, 44% of seabird species, 60% of whale species and 100% of sea otter species. Animals that are in danger of extinction 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 whether the photos showed signs of entanglement (for example, scars from ropes). Of the 626 whales photographed, 519 were caught at least once, and 306 (59%) were caught more often. In most cases, active fishing traps were to blame, but 20% of entanglements were caused by unidentified sources, suggesting marine debris.

To seriously injure the inhabitants of the oceans, it is not at all necessary to set cunning traps; it is enough to throw a ring of packing tape into the sea. Steller sea lions (a genus from the family of eared seals) of Alaska are caught not in nets, but in so-called “garbage collars”: a tape or rubber ring wraps around the neck or across the body and cuts into the tissue, causing pain to the animal, which cannot free itself. The Alaska Game and Fish Department even launched a “Cut the Loop” campaign and explains to citizens that preventing disaster and saving the seal is simple: you just need to “deactivate” the plastic ring before throwing it away. Other species also have their own “favorite” ways of getting entangled: fur seals get caught in scraps of nets, dolphins, turtles and birds get caught in fishing lines.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to understand how entanglement in waste harms populations as a whole. It is difficult to determine whether the animal was caught in a forgotten or deliberately placed net, whether it suffered from ocean debris or from the tricks of fishermen. It is difficult to detect captives in the ocean; scientists obtain most of their data from deceased individuals, so the survival rate is unknown. But it is clear that even those who manage to escape can suffer serious injuries that will prevent them from swimming, feeding and reproducing.

Ingestion of debris is a problem no less serious than entanglement. Plastic is eaten by animals of hundreds of species, of all shapes and sizes, on the surface and in the deep ocean. Firstly, 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 entered the ocean. Filter-feeding animals and those that feed on sludge swallow pieces of plastic while feeding, and predators - if they manage not to eat it by mistake - get the plastic with the bodies of their victims.

Just forty years ago, 74% of dead dusky albatrosses chicks in Hawaii had pieces of plastic in their 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 Ocean, fish ingest between 12,000 and 24,000 tons of plastic per year. All seven species of sea turtles and many invertebrates tried the garbage: crayfish, lobsters and sea cucumbers (the latter generally prefer plastic to their usual food).

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

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

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, scavenging can cause decreased steroid hormone production, delayed ovulation, and reproductive dysfunction.

Research into the effects of marine debris on animal health can be scary. If you eat anything, it can theoretically lead to starvation (while your stomach is full of plastic, you don’t want to eat), wounds, internal bleeding, ulcers, damage to the immune system and secondary infection. The longer waste remains in the digestive system, the greater the harmful health effects. How long it takes to remove plastic from the body depends on the nature of the waste and the physiology of the animal. For some species, the timing is already known: debris swallowed by a mollusk remains in the blood for longer than six weeks, with a crab for longer than four, and with a lobster for 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 chicks to check their stomach contents,” she added. Miriam said that researchers had encountered live fish with plastic in their stomachs. It is unclear whether these fish suffer from malnutrition or excrete waste without much trouble. The digestive systems of fish and birds are different, and it is possible that what is harmful to one is harmless to others. The authors of the new study traditionally warn about the dangers of ingesting plastic, but admit that evidence of its impact on the health of seabirds is relatively scant.

So for the cries of “Garbage is killing the ocean!” there are not enough reasons yet. Moreover, some animals in the plastic mess breed, multiply and feel great. Water strider bugs of the genus Halobates- the only insects that managed to master the open ocean and, apparently, not without human help. Scientists have found that as the number of plastic particles has increased over the past forty years, the number of individuals has also increased. Halobates sericeus in the Pacific Ocean. These insects live in water, and to lay 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 perfect 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.

No one yet 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 increase. But there will be less zooplankton and eggs on which bedbugs feed. Researchers fear that the balance of the ecosystem will be disrupted, and organisms living on the surface will flourish at the expense of animals in the water column.

Plastic waste 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 the Atlantic Ocean, measuring from 1 to 5 mm, scientists found more than a thousand species, among them were plants, consumers of plant food and predators - a full-fledged ecosystem. The microbes on the pieces of plastic were genetically different from those that floated on natural objects - driftwood and feathers - and from those that lived in ocean water. Electron microscopes have revealed that some microorganisms are nesting in cracks on the surface, possibly contributing to the physical degradation of the plastic. Among the colonies of microbes there was an unexpectedly large number of bacteria of the genus Vibrio. Most species of Vibrio are harmless, but some are pathogenic to fish, crustaceans, mollusks or humans. Whether bacteria found on pieces of plastic can cause disease remains to be seen.

The trash doesn't kill sea animals quickly and silently, like a ninja, leaving a nice red streak on the water. It is changing the ocean - and we don't really understand how, and we can't predict exactly what it will lead to. This is scary because humans are part of the oceanic food chain and depend on the existing ecosystem. That’s why I really want to get rid of the piles of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and its younger brothers.

Great Ocean Urn

Why not just clean up all this junk? Because it is difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

If someone wanted to clean up 1% of the North Pacific Ocean (that's a million square kilometers), rented a ship and worked 10 hours a day, traveling at 20 km/h, they would need 67 ships per year. And it would cost from 122 to 489 million dollars - only for the rental of ships.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is conveniently located far from the coastlines of all countries, 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 us that while people can't clean up the ocean's landfill, they can prevent more plastic from ending up there. The American Ocean Conservation Committee annually holds the International Coastal Cleanup Day, an international cleanup event in which up to ninety countries take part. Over the 25 years of this campaign, 65,592,401 kg of trash have been removed from the beaches - an impressive achievement, but it will not help get rid of the waste that is already in the ocean.

20-year-old inventor and innovator from the Netherlands Boyan Slat believes that every single piece of plastic will never be removed. But while still in school, he started thinking about how to clean up the BTMP and whether problems could be turned into opportunities. The spot constantly moves with the current - why not take advantage of this? It would be possible to create an installation that water flows themselves will carry where they need to go.

Slat presented his ideas on the popular conferences TEDx- and no one was impressed. He tried to attract sponsors and contacted three hundred companies, but no one showed interest and the project stalled. A few months after the speech, Boyan Slat began receiving fifteen hundred letters a day from people who wanted to help - someone very successfully shared a recording from the conference on the Internet. Slat took advantage of the moment and 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 sound 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 five-hundred-page calculation and analytical justification was published with a detailed description of the operating principles of the treatment plant.

The installation that Slat and his team propose to build consists of a boom that traps plastic and a platform where it flows. The barrier is attached to the bottom in such a way that marine animals and plankton can swim freely under it. The waste is retained at the boom and moved to a platform where it is collected using 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 is removed from the platform on a product tanker. Boyan Slat proposes to cover the costs of the project through recycling: oil can be obtained from plastic.

Team Ocean Cleanup I seem to have taken into account all possible objections. Those who worry about the fate of 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 remove waste from great depths?” prove that most plastic is in the first three meters below the surface. To ensure that the barrier in real life will collect debris as well as in the computer simulation, Ocean Cleanup built a prototype and tested it near the 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 collected plastic samples to determine how much waste will be removed in 2020, the final stage of the project. In 2016, Boyan Slat and his colleagues will lower the treatment plant into the open ocean for the first time near the island of Tsushima. 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: cleaning BTMP is only part of the solution to the problem. In order to truly end plastic in the ocean, we need to turn off the “garbage stream.” It is impossible to do without waste recycling and coastal cleanup, even if the project Ocean Cleanup will 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 garbage if we give him a chance.”