What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
The name refers to a large area in the North Pacific Ocean packed with debris concentrated in various areas that have incredibly harmful effects to the local wildlife. Ocean debris concentrates in certain places because winds and waves moved them to large surface areas that make up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
A three-year study published in
Scientific Reports Friday discovered that the area is about 1.6 million square kilometers in size, which is roughly 16 times larger than previously predicted and about three times the size of the country of France
Most of the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of ghost nets, which are discarded fishing nets that add up to nearly half of 80,000 metric tons of garbage floating at sea. Additionally, researchers believe that roughly 20% of the total volume of trash is the debris from the catastrophic 2011 Japanese tsunami.
The study was conducted by an international team of scientists with The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, including six universities and an aerial sensor company. They carried out the study of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with two aircraft surveys and 30 vessels that crossed the debris field.
The scientists used nets to survey and collect trash, as well as two six-meter-wide devices that measure medium- to large-sized objects. Plus, they used an aircraft with advanced sensors that collected 3D scans of the ocean garbage, picking up a total of 1.2 million plastic samples.
