A very unnatural phenomenon

Much scarier than the Island of Lost Meals we told you about yesterday is an unnamed island 1,000 miles off the California coast, and covered today by Veronique de Turenne on laobserved.com’s Here in Malibu blog.

It’s 1,500 miles wide, and made up entirely of the plastic we throw away.

“A two-liter plastic bottle that begins its voyage from a storm drain in San Francisco will get pulled into the gyre and take weeks to reach its place among the other debris in the Garbage Patch,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Justin Berton wrote in a story yesterday on the situation.

(Berton calls the island the Great Pacific Garbage Patch–though we’d argue for a new name about 18 percent more … mysterious. Garbage is so limiting, unless it’s ironic, which this isn’t.)

So why is this happening, and why there? Well, we keep throwing stuff away, and apparently, tradewinds give that part of the Pacific Ocean a water-swirling-down-the-drain effect–though, unfortunately, without a drain.

It’s a phenomenon called the North Pacific Gyre, according to Long Beach-based marine researcher Charles Moore, who’s studied it for the past decade–and who has tried, when he can, to pick up some of that wayward plastic.

It’s a losing battle, Moore writes on Here in Malbu, and on his own website: “Most people find it highly distressing to learn that for every 6 pounds of plastic that we got, there was only one pound of zooplankton. In other words, there’s six times more plastic by weight in this area than there is naturally-occurring plankton. However, the Central Pacific, being a gyre, it does accumulate.”

Yes. Yes, it does.

Tags: California, Charles Moore, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Here in Malibu, Island of Lost Meals, Justin Berton, laobserved.com, Long Beach, North Pacific Gyre, San Francisco Chronicle, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Veronique de Turenne