There's a giant - and I do mean giant - swirl of plastic rubbish, twice the size of Texas, aimlessly floating in the meandering currents of the northwestern Pacific. Due to the quirky, circular and endless nature of the planet's greatest ocean tides, all the non-degraded rubbish somehow finds its way to the same spot where it joins an ever-growing raft of detritus.
Twice the size of Texas! A raft of plastic that will never biodegrade, the size of a large country, choking the heart of the planet. If, as is regularly said by the great and the good, the rain-forests are the planet's lungs then the seas are its blood stream and pulse - and the Pacific must be its heart.
I'd heard about this before, but must have filed away it in the back of my mind in the hope that it would go away or turn out not to be true. But it is true and it's scary to the point of being surreal in the true sense of the word. Paraphrasing the report in today's Times...
'The toxic soup of refuse was discovered in 1997 when Charles Moore, an oceanographer, decided to travel through the centre of the North Pacific gyre (a vortex or circular ocean current). Mr Moore found bottle caps, plastic bags and polystyrene floating with tiny plastic chips. Worn down by sunlight and waves, discarded plastic disintegrates into smaller pieces. Suspended under the surface, these tiny fragments are invisible to ships and satellites trying to map the plastic continent, but in subsequent trawls Mr Moore discovered that the chips outnumbered plankton by six to one. The damage caused by these tiny fragments is more insidious than strangulation, entrapment and choking by larger plastic refuse. The fragments act as sponges for heavy metals and pollutants until mistaken for food by small fish. The toxins then become more concentrated as they move up the food chain through larger fish, birds and marine mammals. "You can buy certified organic farm produce, but no fishmonger on earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. This is our legacy,” said Mr Moore.
In the time honoured spirit of thinking globally and acting locally, it seems ever more imperative that we help to rid our small sorry beach from plastic and gunk - not just for our own sake but for the sake of the Pacific - where it seems that it will surely end up.
The story, written in sadly fatalistic tones is here,
