Together these five currents are the “backbone” of the world’s currents and they’re all becoming swamped by plastic. There four other major gyres in the world - the North Atlantic Gyre, the South Atlantic Gyre, the South Pacific Gyre, and the Indian Ocean Gyre - each pull in massive amounts of microplastic. In the meantime, the garbage patch keeps growing, and it’s joined by four other massive accumulations. Boyan Slat, working with a team of engineers, conceived of a mechanism that filters out the particles and ships them to shore for recycling.īut the actual deployment of this technology is still a few years out and nobody knows for sure if it will work. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t visible by satellite, but it gained notoriety partly when an ambitious college dropout set out to clean it up. Read More: Why You Should Absolutely Never Use a Plastic Straw Again For example, many marine animals end up consuming microplastic while searching for plankton and other forms of food and end up getting poisoned in the process. As the upper water column of this gyre fills with tiny bits of plastic, or microplastics, it’s harming marine life in ways that are only just beginning to be understood. The biggest of these gyres, and the biggest ecosystem in the world, is the Northern Pacific Gyre, which hosts the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The oceans' currents flow into and out of these gyres, and as plastic gets swept to sea and travels the globe, it breaks down into smaller pieces and sometimes get trapped in these gyres, forming massive collections of mostly microscopic plastic particles. Gyres are zones of circular ocean currents, like slow-moving whirlpools. In fact, there are a total of five dense soups of microplastic throughout the world, concentrated among the world’s five major gyres. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is probably the most famous accumulation of plastic in the world, and it’s become shorthand for how pollution threatens marine life.īut it turns out that it’s not the only massive “patch” of plastic in the oceans.
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