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Speaker 1: slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, it's Christian Seger. I got a question for you.
Speaker 1: Where is the biggest garbage dump on Earth? It's only
Speaker 1: miles away from California's shores, right in the Pacific Ocean,
Speaker 1: and it's called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. It affects
Speaker 1: our ecosystem by presenting hazards to marine life and the
Speaker 1: fishing industry. Fun right, So what is this Great Pacific
Speaker 1: garbage Patch? Well, it was found by a racing boat
Speaker 1: captain named Charles Moore. When he was saying in from
Speaker 1: Hawaii to California. More noticed millions of pieces of plastics
Speaker 1: surrounding his ship. And the thing is this garbage patch.
Speaker 1: It isn't really that thick. You can't walk on it,
Speaker 1: you can sail through it. Most of the debris isn't
Speaker 1: on the water's surface. Actually, it's more like this plastic
Speaker 1: soup plastic to zooplankton. There is a ratio of six
Speaker 1: to one there in the northern Pacific Ocean. There's an
Speaker 1: ocean gyre, a system of circular ocean currents formed by
Speaker 1: both the Earth's wind patterns and the rotation of the planet,
Speaker 1: and the one in the North Pacific moves slowly in
Speaker 1: a clockwise spiral of currents. It forms an area of
Speaker 1: about twenty million square kilometers that's seven point seven million
Speaker 1: square miles. Now the gyre actually forms two garbage patches.
Speaker 1: There's the Western and Eastern Pacific garbage patches. The eastern
Speaker 1: one floats between Hawaii and California, and it's twice the
Speaker 1: side of Texas. The western one floats between Hawaii and Japan.
Speaker 1: Now they're connected by a six thousand mile long current
Speaker 1: called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Trash debris accumulates there as well,
Speaker 1: and it acts kind of like a highway between the
Speaker 1: two patches. Fishermen and sailors rarely travel through this because
Speaker 1: there is a lack of fish and only some gentle breezes.
Speaker 1: Nearby land masses, however, receive large amounts of this trash
Speaker 1: on their shores. Hawaii, for example, some of the beaches
Speaker 1: there are buried in five to ten feet of trash.
Speaker 1: Some say they can't quantify how much trash there actually
Speaker 1: is in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Others claim it
Speaker 1: holds three point five million tons of waste. There are
Speaker 1: four other similar gyres in the world's ocean, and all
Speaker 1: of them hold trash. So where does the trash in
Speaker 1: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from? Well, eight scent
Speaker 1: of ocean trash originates on land, mainly in North America
Speaker 1: and Asia. Rivers and overflowing storm drains carry garbage out
Speaker 1: to the ocean, and also some of it comes from
Speaker 1: the litter that are on beaches now, Trash from America's
Speaker 1: coast takes six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Speaker 1: Trash from Asia, however, takes only a year to get there,
Speaker 1: and it's mostly made of plastic. Plastic has been only
Speaker 1: around for a little over a century, and today we
Speaker 1: use two hundred billion pounds of it a year. Ten
Speaker 1: percent of that ends up in the ocean. Plastic makes
Speaker 1: up roughly eighty percent of ocean waste, and every square
Speaker 1: mile of ocean hosts forty six thousand pieces of plastic.
Speaker 1: These pieces are often less than a millimeter wide, so
Speaker 1: for example, think of like plastic bags, or bottle caps
Speaker 1: or water bottles or styrofoam cups all of those breaking down.
Speaker 1: Like take a plastic bottle for example. It takes five
Speaker 1: hundred years to break something like that down, so it's
Speaker 1: out there for a long time, and they don't wear down,
Speaker 1: they just break into smaller pieces because of sun exposure.
Speaker 1: These tiny pieces are called mermaid tears or nerdles. I
Speaker 1: know it sounds cute, but not so much. The plastics
Speaker 1: in the ocean have different levels of toxicity, and the
Speaker 1: pieces concentrate and absorbed chemicals and poisons that are also
Speaker 1: now in the water, like an oil spill for example.
Speaker 1: The pieces also leach out pollutants, photodegradation, leeches out colorance,
Speaker 1: and chemicals linked to environmental and health problems into the water.
Speaker 1: All right, so how about some examples of how these
Speaker 1: cause hazards for animals. Well, when animals eat the plastic,
Speaker 1: both kinds of chemicals go into their bodies, and these
Speaker 1: chemicals could be passed up the food chain. Plastic garbage
Speaker 1: kills one million birds a year and a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: ocean animals like dolphins and turtles. Now, let's take an
Speaker 1: albatross for instance. It ingests lots of plastic trash on
Speaker 1: Midway Island alone. They can give birth to five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand chicks a year. Two hundred thousand of these chicks
Speaker 1: die because their parents accidentally feed them plastic and what
Speaker 1: happens is that punctures their digestive tracks, killing them. Same
Speaker 1: with loggerhead turtles. They mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, for instance,
Speaker 1: or seals. They get trapped in fishing nuts and drown.
Speaker 1: There's a term for this, it's actually called ghost fishing
Speaker 1: an algae. Because microplastics block sunlight, algae and plankton communities
Speaker 1: are also threatened. This could affect the entire ecosystem or
Speaker 1: food web, with less food to go around in general,
Speaker 1: making seafood less available for humans at the top of
Speaker 1: the food chain. So how do we prevent this? How
Speaker 1: do we clean up this great Pacific garbage patch? Well,
Speaker 1: trawling the ocean for trash is just impossible, and it
Speaker 1: would also harm the plankton that's already there. It would
Speaker 1: take sixty seven ships a year to clean up less
Speaker 1: than one percent of the North Pacific. So the best
Speaker 1: thing that we can do is manage waste on land,
Speaker 1: try to find alternatives to plastic, use biodegradables instead, expand
Speaker 1: recycling programs, to accommodate for more types of plastic and
Speaker 1: buy fewer plastic items, or you can always recycle. Check
Speaker 1: out the brain suff channel on YouTube, and for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com