Great Pacific Garbage Patch now Twice the Size of Texas
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of plastic floating halfway between California and Hawaii is growing, and is now double the size of Texas – at 600,000 square miles!
According to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization who completed the most detailed study of the garbage patch, says that winds and ocean currents funnel the trash into a central location, creating an island made solely of trash. It is made up of more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic (1,800,000,000,000) weighing more the 88,000 tons. These figures are 16 times higher than previous estimates.
The study uncovered that the garbage patch isn’t just made up of small fragments as previously thought, but have a surprisingly large number of bigger pieces. These results were formed from a three-year mapping effort by a group of scientists from Ocean Cleanup Foundation, six universities, and an aerial sensor company.
Sadly, this isn’t the only collection of trash in the oceans; it is the largest of five known collections, and if efforts aren’t put in now to reduce the amount of trash or remove it, the plastic could deteriorate and pose a grave threat for marine life.
