“The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, grisly wreaths of feathers and bone surrounding colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line and small Styrofoam balls. […] Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their young. Their flight paths from Midway often take them over what is perhaps the world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas. This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part of a system of currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Located halfway between San Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an area of slack winds and sluggish currents where flotsam collects from around the Pacific, much like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot tub. Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been studying the clockwise swirl of plastic debris so long, he talks about it as if he were tracking a beast.”
“Ebbesmeyer, who coined the phrase “garbage patch” in the 1990s, compares it to “a big animal without a leash.” It sloshes around at the whim of the weather, and when it strays close to land “barfs up” a load of plastic debris.” (Curtis Ebbesmeyer writes in his book, Flotsametrics and the Floating World)
“Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.” http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
“For years we’ve been reading about a patch of garbage the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, ingeniously dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Basically, any trash that gets dumped in the water rides the currents to this one spot and joins an ever-increasing flotilla of crap. […] VBS joined the crew of a research vessel studying the trash and sailed out into one of the most remote spots of open water in the world, the North Pacific Gyre, in search of this mythical garbage island. What we discovered once we got there was an ecological disaster beyond any of our expectations and possibly the single worst thing human beings have done to the planet and ourselves. Hope you’re into cancer and sex-reversal!” » http://www.vbs.tv/shows/toxic/garbage-island/
videos » http://www.celsias.com/article/searching-for-the-pacifics-mythical-garbage-island/
“A project that is taking on an appalling problem with practical solutions and creating commercial diesel fuel technology at the same time. […] Project Kaisei, a new group setting sail in August [2009] to research and clean up the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-liz-thomson/planet-ocean-riding-a-gre_b_218493.html
“The five major oceanic gyres make up about a quarter of the Earth’s surface. Underneath the apparent chaos of the world’s weather, the gyres turn like clockworks, driven by the sun and the Earth’s rotation. A bit of flotsam entering the current off the coast of Brazil might make it all the way to West Africa and then bob on back to where it started in about three years. Or it might catch an eddy and maroon in mid-ocean.”