A Texas-size trash island and other ugly truths
August 2nd, 2006
Pick just a few paragraphs out of the Los Angeles Times’s five-part “Altered Oceans” series, and you’ll never want to drop so much as a bottle cap on the beach again. Hardly just another tirade about litter, the extensive investigative package traces the life cycle of trash from the world’s cities and into its oceans. Each article focuses on a different but harsh side effect, from how altered ocean chemistries are radically changing natural habitats to gruesome stories of dead albatross birds whose bellies have been stuffed with non-biodegradable garbage. But the most startling fact by involves the masses of flotsam converging in the ocean where cold and warm water systems meet:
Trash “gets trapped for decades in swirling waters called gyres, but known informally as garbage patches. The one off the western U.S. is about twice the size of Texas. A smaller gyre is south of Japan.”
Wow. Plastic bags never sounded so scary.
August 4th, 2006 at 2:05 am
that is horrifying… we just got back from an overnight camping trip on a somewhat isolated part of the beach just across from Pensacola NAS, but still found more garbage than we ever could have imagined. The worst thing? I wish I could say it was mostly hurricane debris, but it was pretty easy to tell that the majority of it was not. Simply disgusting.