Third-generation Long Beach resident Charles Moore, captain of the research vessel the Alguita—and pioneering researcher of the Pacific Ocean garbage patch also known as the gyre—is featured in the New York Times.

Moore is a trailblazer in the field of studying the flotsam and jetsam which blankets areas of our ocean in ever-increasingly large patches.

Fifteen years ago, the Times‘ Lindsey Hoshaw notes, he founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which has focused on the gyre phenomenon for the past decade.

“Environmentalists and celebrities are using the patch to promote their own causes,” Hoshaw writes.

“Mr. Moore, however, is the first person to have pursued serious scientific research by sampling the garbage patch. In 1999, he dedicated the Algalita foundation to studying it. Now the foundation examines plastic debris and takes samples of polluted water off the California coast and across the Pacific Ocean.”

Where exactly is the gyre? About 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii, per the Times‘ dateline. And what’s in it?

“Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch,” Hoshaw writes, “an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.”

The sad part is—it’s growing.

“This is not the garbage patch I knew in 1999,” Moore told the Times. “This is a totally different animal.”

There’s also this: “Many scientists believe there is a garbage patch off the coast of Japan and another in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” Hoshaw writes.

Interesting note—at the story’s end, there’s this italicized tagline: “Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.”

Maybe that’s what the future will look like, for members of the media.

Tags: Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Alguita, Atlantic Ocean, California, Captain Charles Moore, Japan, Lindsey Hoshaw, Long Beach, new york times, Pacific gyre, Pacific Ocean, Pacific Ocean garbage patch, Popsicle, Sargasso Sea, Southern California, Spot.Us, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas