Great Pacific Garbage Patch - bigger by 25 million tons since March.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has become an increasingly larger and more permanent part of the ocean -- plastic and other floatables, along with concentrations of chemical sludge, estimated to measure from 0.4 percent to 8 percent of the entire Pacific and responsible for disruptions of the food chain affecting various species of aquatic life. Now, thanks to the March tsunami near Japan, the estimated 25 million tons of debris from cars, homes, appliances, shipping containers, chemicals, etc., from coastal Fukushima that washed back out to sea will soon be caught in the same Pacific swirls, in what a French environmental group forecast would be a pair of ocean-navigating journeys that will last at least 10 years, gradually breaking off and joining (thus substantially enlarging) the two distinct legs of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

“Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or “trash vortex” – essentially a floating expanse of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean now covering an area twice the size of the continental U.S. Believed to hold almost 100m tons of flotsam, this vast “plastic soup” stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan:

“The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.”

Who cares??
Everyone is too busy worrying about carbon to consider something important like REAL POLLUTION.

Use half the material and break down to build a make shift spacecraft to put th other half in and send it to the sun. problem solved?

reply to post by CeeRZ


Take that mother earth!!!

thats for earthquakes, volcanos, and bees.

Keep on littering until we make a difference.

And this will surely have to be addressed at some point in time in the near future. I don't want to be the one that has to go out there and police all of that up somehow, but we will have to do it. Perhaps if we could reallocate some of the money we are spending on pointless wars, and aid to nations that have wronged us in the past, we could put together some sort of co-op mission to clean it up.

Oh wait. We rather go drop bombs and destroy things instead.

So anyway, what're your thoughts on this CeeRZ?

I'm sure seeing such a flotsam island in person must be heartbreaking if one were to care at all about the condition of our planet, and may even conjure up images/thoughts of the movie Idiocracy.

But in the end, Earth will have the final word, and shrug us off when it so chooses, again.

The problem will only get worse. Pretty Sad we don't take better care of the earth that feeds and shelters us.

There are three primary obstacles to any effort proposed to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch:

Distance:
Photodegradation:
Cost:

curiosity.discovery.com...

It is roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count are only part of what can be found in this accidental dump floating midway between Hawaii and San Francisco.

www.greatgarbagepatch.org...

There is a proverb which states May you live in interesting times...

How often does a person get to witness the voluntary extinction of thier species? This is a once-in-an-epoch show and we, those who are aware, get to watch as the rest of our society runs around like a decapitated chicken.

Personally, I'm waiting for the whole thing to catch on fire due to chemical interaction.

Originally posted by [davinci]
There is a proverb which states May you live in interesting times...

voluntary extinction of thier species? This is a once-in-an-epoch show

Bit of an exaggeration I would say...

Voluntary extinction of the species?

This patch is big but compared to the whole oceans it is a dot on the map..

I have NOT contributed to ANY of that trash!!!!

Shame on anyone who has!!

Also why SHOULD AMERICA, be responsible for all that crap?

Let the other GREAT countries of this world do something for a change...
Nice wish... I KNOW

Originally posted by hillynilly

Bit of an exaggeration I would say...

Not really.

There is a river that runs through the center of my city but I can't drink the water. In most citys there are air pollution indexes that provide warnings for anyone with breathing problems. The food we eat has to be washed to clean off the chemicals used in modern agriculture...not to mention the literal poisoning of the soil when the actual spraying is done...

This patch is big but compared to the whole oceans it is a dot on the map..

Did you look at the pictures?

That's a pretty big dot considering it is the only man-made object that can be seen from space.

I have NOT contributed to ANY of that trash!!!!

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if you live in this society you have contributed.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Have a look at this thread. It mentions this garbage island and the possibilities of what it is doing to our environment. You imagine, a trash island, the size of texas. Something that big would have to cause some reaction.

is it radioactive yet?? by what I heard, all the stuff that was washed off of japan by the tsunami is heading it's way.....cars, buildings, and I imagine some of it will be radioactive....

Guess how big it will be a year from now!

Seriously, I bring this topic up to people I talk to now and then, and it doesn't surprised me that most of them had no clue and never heard of it. Many of them are initially skeptical as well.

We knew that trash was going somewhere, huh? Humans are 'intelligent'? Not so sure, not so sure...

Youde thik with al the recycling going on, this garbage patch shouldnt be thier???
Where i work, in southwest CT near one of the richest citys in the US, out on the sidewalk, we have a large garbage can, and the city, 20 feet or so away, has a 30 gallon size steel can, 2 of them..one for garbage, the other for bottles. the recycling one, for bottles, is almost, always empty. People just trhow thier plastics and c ans and glass bottles into the regualr garbage. how niave and a waste of money that is.
i remember a true story a friends older brother once told me. he said it was common, at least up to the mid 90's, hospitols, to cut costs, would hire someone to dump thier medical waste off a secluded pier or cliff or something, into the ocean water, that inlcudes things labled biohazard, as in used needles.
i wonder if our citys are doing the same thing to cut costs..dumping recycables into the ocean>? to explain such an accumulation of garage!

Why don't we nuke it?

I am being serious... Nuke it.

Vaporize the thing. Poof.

If the heat from the blast melts all of that plastic, then even better... we have a SOLID floating island. I would pay for a boat ticket to go stand on something like that!

This all being said, are there any actual pictures of this thing?

Of course, judging by some of the replies already, we won't do a damn thing about it until it affects humans in some noticable (keyword) way. And it will.

It is effecting humans..the BPA alone in plastics im sure will and haas already found itsway onto shores and local water supplys.

Originally posted by TheOneYouFearIsRight
This all being said, are there any actual pictures of this thing?

not exactly photos but a good way to get perspective nonetheless...


peace,
-Bob

Upto 8% of the pacific and the size of Texas already?

Damn i was aware it was there but this big?

How much would the waterlevel have risen (and keep rising) because of all this junk i wonder...?

Many People try to develop a System to harvest all this Stuff,
there are very huge amounts of Money, floating in the Oceans
and the first one get the biggest part of it!

reply to post by ziggy1706

I said 'noticable' ways. Humans usually don't care about anything until it starts affecting their pocketbooks.