6:40 p.m.
I ran across this story today and was amazed that I'd never heard of this before:
Giant garbage patch floating in Pacific
"An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii . . . The trash stew is 80 percent plastic and weighs more than 3.5 million tons."
Twice the size of Texas? I mean, we could dump some dirt on the thing and call it an island nation -- and it's only supposed to get bigger as time goes on. The article states that this debris patch has been accumulating since the 1950's . . . did no one think, through the passage of over five decades, that perhaps we might want to take some action regarding our oceanic trash pit before we hit the point of no return?
And why does all that trash accumulate in this particular spot in the first place? There's a 10-million-square-mile oval in the Pacific that's known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre, an area that's almost unnaturally calm because of the lingering mountain of high pressure air that renders the waters near motionless.
In 1997, a sailor named Charles Moore decided to take his boat through the gyre, and didn't like what he saw:
"It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap . . . Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents."
Ugh. Thank god there's only place like this in the ocean, right? Right?
"There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. "That corresponds to a quarter of the earth's surface," Moore says. "So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes."
I'm not remotely close to being considered an environmentalist, yet this information makes even me shudder.
I suppose there isn't any chance that we could just load the whole mess onto some rockets and blast it off into orbit?
"As of June 21, 2000, the (U.S. Space Command) counted 8,927 man-made objects in the great above and beyond; some are there more or less permanently. Of the total, 2,671 are satellites (working or not), 90 are space probes that have been launched out of Earth orbit, and 6096 are mere chunks of debris zooming around the third planet from the Sun."
Oh, yeah . . . we're already a little crowded up there as it is. So, when exactly are we leaving for Mars? I'm not so sure how much time we've got left on this big unflushed toilet we call home.
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