This is where all those things that wash down rivers to the sea end up.. Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[RedEarth]

There is a large part of the central Pacific Ocean that no one ever visits and only a few ever pass through. Sailors avoid it like the plague for it lacks the wind they need to sail Fishermen leave it alone because its lack of nutrients makes it an oceanic desert

....

For the last 50-odd years, every piece of plastic that has made it from our shores to the Pacific Ocean has been breaking down and accumulating in the central Pacific gyre. Oceanographers like Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the world's leading flotsam expert, refer to it as the great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The problem is that it is not a patch, it's the size of a continent, and it's filling up with floating plastic waste. My research has documented 6 pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton in this area.

My latest three-month round-trip research voyage, to be completed in Santa Barbara this week, got closer to the center of the garbage patch than before and found levels of plastic fragments that were far higher for hundreds of miles.

We spent weeks documenting the effects of what amounts to floating plastic sand of all sizes on the creatures that inhabit this area Our photographers captured images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed line, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colorful plastic fragments in their bellies.

As we drifted in the center of this system, doing underwater photography day and night, we began to realize what was happening A paper plate thrown overboard just stayed with us; there was no wind or current to move it away. This is where all those things that wash down rivers to the sea end up.

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Pacific-Garbage-Patch27oct02.htm

[daninthemoon]

1. I grew up in Orange County California. In the 60's, we would go to

Huntington Beach. The sand was mostly composed of tiny white and blue sea shells, and the water was a deep blue. At the water line, if you dug your hand in the sand, you would pull up a fisfull of sand crabs. By the time I left Cali in 1990, The sand was just a dirty brown sand, no shells. The water was green/brown from all the sewage. There were no sand crabs. I could also mention that as a kid, one could look inland from the beach and see the mountains. No more. On summer evenings, I sometimes used to smell orange blossoms, and we were fairly far from those orchards. Now all you smell is smog. It's all happened in my lifetime.

[losthills]

2. That's why I just shake my head

when people moan about the horrors of "Peak OIl."

As far as I'm concerned, peak oil can't come soon enough...

[Nihil]

4. On this point ...

> As far as I'm concerned, peak oil can't come soon enough...

... I totally agree with you.
:thumbsup:

[codjh9]

3. Example # 3,467,824 of the effects of too many people... n/t