Sailing to the Pacific Ocean’s Trash Vortex

by Rachel Riederer on 2 Sep 2017 In the summer of 1997, sea captain and surfer Charles Moore was sailing home from Hawaii. He’d been recently finished the TransPacific Yacht Race, and on the way back to California, he decided to take a shortcut. Instead of following the current that swoops along the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, he set a course through the still waters of the high-pressure zone at its center.

“1997 was the largest El Niño on record,” he recalled years later. “It had the warmest surface water in the Pacific,” which made the waters extremely smooth and calm. As Moore passed through, he noticed something: trash—specifically plastic trash—all around. This remote part of the ocean was, he told Stephen Colbert in 2010, “a disgusting plastic cesspool.”

News of Moore’s discovery quickly took on a life of its own. The swirl of debris came to be known variously as the great Pacific garbage patch, the Pacific trash vortex and the island of floating trash. It was a colorful symbol of an often overlooked problem. Global warming had its starving polar bear; now, ocean pollution had its Frankenstein trash island. By 2012, one particular image of the patch attached to much of the coverage. It showed a stretch of ocean completely clogged with brightly colored plastic flotsam. Only after looking at the image for a while could you notice the man in a boat in the center of the frame, a Where’s Waldo stranded in a scene of environmental catastrophe.

But that picture wasn’t taken at the garbage patch. It was taken near the shore in the Bay of Manila. The plastic pollution in the gyre is far less visible. “It wasn’t like an island of trash like people keep wanting to say,” Moore clarified in an interview with Earth Island Journal. “It’s just that I couldn’t survey the surface of the ocean for any period of time while standing on deck without seeing some anthropogenic debris float by.”

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