Who Wants some Plastic Soup?

Imagine you’re on a boat exploring the Pacific ocean.  Then all of a sudden you notice an Island in the water the size of Texas.  This is not a regular island though.  This island is made of plastic and trash about 30 feet deep into the water.  This not only exists, but there are two in existence in the Pacific ocean.  The are known to some as the “Pacific Plastic Trash Gyres“.  These gyres have trapped trash and plastic inside the Pacific ocean’s current.  The western garbage patch is a little north of Hawaii and the eastern garbage patch is located east of Japan.

Many are skeptical to the existence of these trash gyres because theycannot be seen from the surface.  The trash gyres are vortexes of densely compacted plastic that can mostly only be seen underwater.  When researchers have gone to look at the gyre they see vasts amounts of plastics and trash underwater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=z7rNYzSH-BA

Most of the trash in the Pacific ocean gyres is plastic.  Since plastic is not biodegradable, it is broken up through the process of photo degradation.  Even when broken down the plastic molecules remain as plastics.  The large amount of plastic in the water is causing humans to eat their own plastic through a process called bioaccumulation.  First there is a large amount of plastic in the water.  Then plankton eat some of the plastic in the water.  That plankton gets eaten by some fish.  The food chain goes on a little longer until humans are eating fish that have large amounts of plastic in them.  Humans create 100% of the plastic that ends up inside the ocean.

Scientists have been able to notice the irregularity of chemicals in the ocean through lab tests.  Some of the plastic chemicals found in certain parts of the ocean are not found in the natural environment.  Now animals are accidentally consuming plastic derived chemicals that can potentially cause cancer in humans.  Humans have created a catastrophe in the ocean.  People have turned the ocean into a giant bowl of plastic soup that animals and humans are in fact eating.