Let’s Talk Trash! life in the gyre. For instance, loggerhead sea turtles often mistake plastic bags for [jellyfish], their favorite food. Albatrosses mistake plastic resins for fish eggs and feed them to chicks, which die of starvation or ruptured organs. Seals and other marine mammals are especially at risk. They can get entangled in abandoned plastic fishing nets, which are being discarded more often because of their low cost. Seals and other mammals often drown in these forgotten nets—a phenomenon known as ‘ghost fishing.’” Even though some companies are trying to make use of the plastics from the Garbage Patch,
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This shocking fact is from the Center for Biological Diversity. Plastics, whether in the ocean or in other natural environments, are ingested by birds, fish and other animals. The plastics in their bodies causes irreparable harm, but there are also long-term effects to the animals higher on the food chain because of the chemical makeup of the plastics. What about the Atlantic Ocean? Billions of bits of plastic are grouping together in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say. “But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.” The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude— roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia As with the Pacific garbage patch, plastic can circulate in this part of the Atlantic Ocean for years, posing health risks to fish, seabirds, and other marine animals that accidentally eat the litter.
they remain a huge global mess that the mess is not contained to just the patches. The chemicals and broken down plastics find their way into the ocean and into all of the ocean creatures.
“In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of plastic end up in the world’s oceans.”
A SUBTROPICAL GYRE: In oceanography, a subtropical gyre is a ring-like system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere caused by the Coriolis Effect.
Oceanography is the branch of science that deals with the physical and biological properties and phenomena of the sea.
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