Following our trash to sea
by grmeyers
Nick Mallos, a scientist from the Ocean Conservancy, joined on the expedition to the North Pacific Gyre.
Embarking on an important journey this past August, the Ocean Conservancy set sail with San Francisco-based Project Kaisei to expand its research and help with some cleanup on the massive trash vortex that exists in the North Pacific Gyre. Four boats joined in the journey, including a barge large enough to haul away some of the trash that was found in this “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
The North Pacific Gyre, an area between California and the Hawaiian Islands, happens to be where trash from around the world is trapped – much of it plastic – due to four converging ocean currents. Some estimates report the gyre is twice the size of Texas, others argue its size goes double that of the United States.
The actual size of the garbage patch is a great question, says Nick Mallos, Nick Mallos, a marine scientist and member of Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris program who joined the expedition. He describes the trash vortex as being more like an archipelago in character, with parts being clear ocean, while other parts are dense and deep with trash.
Mallos collects data on microplastics, parts that have broken from bottles and packages into very small pieces that almost resemble confetti. “There was this shimmering gleam of color because the water column just below the surface was littered with these objects. I was just astonished,” says Mallos. “In certain areas, the top three to six feet of water is absolutely dense with these microplastics. If you wave your hand in the water, you come up with these fragments on your hands.”
