by Skye Moody
Savoring their Transpac showing, Moore and his crew decided to take a shortcut home, a route that would bring them straight through the wind-poor gyre most Pacific sailors avoid. Alguita, an aluminum-hulled catamaran, was equipped with auxiliary twin diesel engines and carried extra fuel, so Moore wasn’t worried about lacking wind to propel the sails.
The North Pacific subtropical gyre is oval-shaped, measures about eighteen hundred miles from south to north, and reaches from Asia to North America. As its surface waters swirl, they make approximately one rotation every three years. Depending on the season, the tilt of Earth’s axis, and weather, the gyre alternately bumps up against Asia or the North American mainland. The largest of the world’s ocean gyres are the North Pacific subtropical gyre and the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, which includes the mesmerizing and mysterious Sargasso Sea.
The center of each gyre is similar to the eye of a hurricane; in a gyre, the water whirling at its center sits slightly higher than the surrounding water. Unlike a whirlpool that spirals downward, ocean gyres just keep spinning around and around. The gyres are created by masses of airflow moving from the tropics toward the polar caps. North of the Equator, ocean gyres travel clockwise; south of the Equator, they move counterclockwise. Air in the North Pacific subtropical gyre becomes heated at the equator and rises above the cooler air masses surrounding it. Meantime, Earth is rotating, moving the heated air mass westward as it is rising, then eastward once it cools. When the air descends at around 30 degrees north latitude, it becomes a huge clockwise rotating mass, which in turn causes a high-pressure system throughout the region. The circular winds produce circular ocean currents, which spiral into a center. As in a hurricane, winds near the center are calmer. Any vessel depending on wind power could get stuck in the still atmosphere and never escape—a nightmare scenario many mariners have feared over the centuries.
For days on end Alguita encountered no vessels, no land, nothing but the huge Pacific rolling out to the horizon in every direction. Here in the middle of some of the remotest ocean on the planet, Moore leaned out the cabin door to idly scan the water. That’s when he spotted floating plastic objects. And then he spotted more. And more. During seven days crossing the gyre, Moore says that no matter what time of day he looked out, he never saw clear water, just a carpet of floating debris, bottles, bottle caps, plastic wrappers, beach balls, and fragments of plastic.
That the North Pacific subtropical gyre was littered with refuse was known to only a handful of marine biologists and oceanographers. Two years earlier, shortly after Curt Ebbesmeyer’s mom jiggled his mental light switch, Curt—with Jim Ingraham and his OSCURS technology—attended an international oceanography conference in Hawaii. Ingraham presented a scholarly paper that alerted his colleagues to the massive amounts of flotsam accumulating in smaller gyres within the world’s major gyres. These swirling trash heaps, Ingraham said, hold many thousands of tons of flotsam, including spilled cargo and jettisoned trash. At a loss for what to call these whirling gyres of man-made flotsam, Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer coined the term “garbage patch.” The terminology caught on: Today, oceanographers studying the North Pacific’s Great Garbage Patch speak of its two subgyres as the Eastern Garbage Patch and Western Garbage Patch. The same labels are attached to similar gyres in the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Ingraham’s OSCURS computer tracking system is able to apply hindsighting to objects floating in and out of the patches, to trace their places of origin, and to predict where they might wash up. But the extent of the garbage circulating in the North Pacific subtropical gyre was not known until two years later, when Captain Moore and his Alguita crew returned home from the 1997 Transpac and reported their findings.
What Moore already knew was that within the North Pacific gyre are two subgyres, each roughly the size of Texas. The western subgyre lies off Asia; the eastern subgyre lies off the U.S. mainland. While the entire North Pacific gyre was found to contain vast amounts of garbage of human manufacture, the two smaller gyres each contained thick, soupy concentrations of the same trash in a partially degrated state.
A piece of flotsam might circle in the gyre or subgyres for hundreds of years before spinning off into a feeder current. For example, take an inflated beach ball jettisoned off a pleasure boat in the Hawaiian Islands. Depending on wind direction, the beach ball may enter the Kuroshio Current off Japan, travel north on the Kuroshio and enter the North Pacific Drift, and from there enter the California Current off Washington State, then travel south on the California Current and eventually wash up on a U.S. West Coast beach. Or, the beach ball may veer off into another branch of the Kuroshio, travel back toward Hawaii, or even the Philippines. More fantastic, the beach ball may just continue drifting from one current into another without washing up, perhaps eventually reentering the North Pacific subtropical gyre for another spin around the ocean’s six-thousand-mile circle of coastal currents. Once in the Great Garbage Patch, the beach ball might get sucked into the more concentrated western or eastern garbage patches, adding to what Moore calls a viscous “synthetic broth.”
Infinite possibilities exist for the beach ball and other flotsam riding the ocean currents. One thing’s for certain, says Moore: Made of plastic, the beach ball will never biodegrade, and the longer it drifts in the ocean, the more poisonous it becomes. Plastic, a petroleum-based substance, does not biodegrade, but rather photo-degrades, breaking down gradually into smaller and smaller bits. These bits will continue to drift on the ocean, where they often are ingested by birds, fish, and sea mammals, taking in plastic’s toxins. If not ingested by sea life, the plastic will continue to photo-degrade until it has broken down to the molecular level. At this point the molecules absorb any DDT or PCBs and other toxins in the water, making the molecule even more toxic. All this would be fine, perhaps, if the beach ball were the only piece of plastic circulating in the gyre. But according to Moore’s calculations, the two smaller gyres inside the Great Garbage Patch each contain six times more plastic per weight than they contain zooplankton, the principal organisms that live in the nutrient-poor gyres. This translates into billions of tons of nonbiodegradable refuse.
Moore was not exactly a novice to ocean flotsam, jetsam, and lagan. He was raised in Southern California by the Pacific Ocean and has worked in seagoing trades for more than fifty years. During those decades he watched in alarm as the amount of human refuse in the ocean gradually increased, particularly plastics. But Moore became especially worried at what he saw in the gyre. This carpet of garbage whirling around in remote Pacific waters really galvanized his interest; on that single voyage through the plastic sea, Moore calculated the weight of the gyre’s litter at around 3 million tons. Then and there he vowed to return to test his estimate.
The Great North Pacific Garbage Patch was about to have its measurements taken. In August 1998, Moore and a crew of four volunteers set out aboard Alguita from Point Conception, California. They brought various nets including a manta trawl, a fine mesh net attached to a frame shaped somewhat like a manta ray with a wide mouth and wings. Eight days out, they reached the edge of the gyre about eight hundred miles offshore and decided to test the manta trawl. They trawled for flotsam for about three and a half miles before reeling in the net. Among a small amount of sea life, they found thousands of fragments of colored plastic. Amazed, they went out for more, using a complex series of nets. In the end, they hauled aboard about one ton of debris, including numerous large objects such as an inflatable dinghy and what Moore describes as a “menacing medusa of tangled net lines and hawsers that we hung from the A-frame of our catamaran and named Polly P, for the polypropylene lines that made up its bulk.”
Moore and his crew returned to the gyre in 1999 and again in 2000, 2002, and 2005, each visit verifying the statistical data gathered on previous voyages. In September 2000 they trawled a six-thousand-mile transect across the gyre. Moore reported the gyre’s surface layer contained “alarming amounts of plastic products, tons of drifting nets, pl
astic bags, packing straps, and common household items like soap and deodorant bottles.”
He has also found Japanese traffic cones, jellyfish entangled in fishing nets, sarps and transparent filter-feeding organisms with stomachs filled with plastic bottle caps, a drum of hazardous chemicals, an inflated volleyball coated in goose-necked barnacles, a cathode-ray television tube (nineteen-inch screen), an inflated truck tire mounted on its steel rim, a gallon-size bleach bottle so brittle that it crumbled in one crew member’s hands. Each time they dove to visually confirm their findings at the end of a trawl, they found the ubiquitous soup of plastic fragments. On one trip into the gyre, on September 7, 2000, Moore found what appeared to be a container spill of plastic bags that covered more than ten miles of the gyre’s center. The bags bore the imprints of Taco Bell, Sears, El Pollo Loco, Fred Meyer, the Baby Store, and Bristol Farms. A very large “mother bag” was also found, an indication the large bag had fallen off a cargo vessel en route from manufacture in Asia to the United States.
According to various visitors, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch also contains refrigerators, air conditioners, construction materials, chairs, glass fish-net floats, fenders, tires, wooden crates, athletic shoes, flip-flops, glass sake and Suntori bottles, even bottles with messages inside, and ghost nets that trap and kill thousands of marine species and birds.
Jim Ingraham’s OSCURS drift charts show flotsam originating off Pacific Rim coastlines trapped in currents that will take the flotsam on a virtually endless odyssey around the ocean. What doesn’t snick off into a side current and wash up, that is. Employing OSCURS simulation and long experience, Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer have correctly predicted when and where whole cargo containers of spilled debris will wash up. Some of the flotsam washes up in Pacific bird colonies, such as those of the Tern Island albatross, the Guadalupe Island albatross, and Laysan albatross. In the Algalita Foundation’s film The Synthetic Sea, Bob Dieli, a Midway Atoll park ranger, shows the carcass of a Laysan albatross and points out what was found in the dead bird’s stomach: a large screw-top plastic bottle cap that appeared to be from a shampoo bottle, a light stick used for fishing nets, and an electrical wire plug. Moore and his colleagues have seen in the last decade an “alarming increase” in the numbers of seabirds killed by human-generated garbage. Moore says, “Ours is the last generation of human beings who will remember what the ocean was like before it got trashed.”
As for the sea life, “For jellyfish and other marine animals, it’s like putting them on a plastic diet. It becomes part of their tissue.”
Moore points out that once these creatures ingest the toxins, they are eaten by fish and the toxins pass into the food chain, eventually ending up in the food consumed by humans.
Rob Krebs of the American Plastics Council says, “Just because it’s everywhere, it shouldn’t be the whipping boy of environmentalists.” Krebs correctly states that plastics do “so much, so well,” and adds, “and so when we talk about Charles Moore we really have to look in the mirror.” In other words, it is not plastic that pollutes, but people.
And Moore partly agrees. “It’s everybody’s fault. There are no single guilty parties in this problem of plastic flotsam. Until the world decides to convert most of its petroleum-based plastics to something biodegradable, we’re going to live with this problem, and as more plastics are used, the problem is just going to get worse. But there are biodegradable products out there, made from corn oil and soybean oil. People have to make the conversion.”
The Slick Sargasso Sea
In the film The Wide Sargasso Sea, a woman drowns among ribbons of seaweed in sunlight-infused waters, a scene shot from below the surface, offering a fish-eye view of drowning. But the tragedy is lost to the beautiful mystery of languid sargasso seaweed slow-dancing as it absorbs sunshine in a sultry windless gyre. Located within the North Atlantic subtropical gyre—the North Atlantic’s Great Garbage Patch—the Sargasso Sea is not all drowning beauties and sargassum. Like the North Pacific Garbage Patch, the Sargasso Sea, according to Captain Charles Moore, is thick with flotsam from transoceanic cargo spills and other man-made products that rode ocean currents before entering the world’s most baffling doldrums. Some visitors—and there aren’t many—insist they’ve seen satellite parts, space shuttle debris, deflated weather balloons, airplane parts, crash debris, crates of plastic wrapped her-ion, and scores of Evian bottles. It’s a flotsamist’s dream come true, a garbage patch whose waving viridescent fingers hold fast whatever slips into their grasp.
Bounded by the powerful Gulf Stream on the west, the North Atlantic Current and Canary Current on the east, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current on the south, the Sargasso Sea is elliptical, about two thousand miles long and seven hundred miles wide, covering approximately 2 million square miles of ocean. Located roughly between 20 and 35 degrees north latitude and between 30 and 70 degrees west longitude, the sea lies between the West Indies and the Azores. At 32 degrees, 20 minutes north latitude, Bermuda’s pink beaches fringe the Sargasso’s northwestern edge.
Known in legend as a lifeless realm, the extremely salty, almost motionless Sargasso Sea produces abundant sargassum, organic flotsam every Florida beachcomber knows intimately. The European eel leaves its larvae there among the sargassum; hatched eels pop off to Europe for a spell, returning seasonally to lay eggs of their own. Carthaginian Admiral Himilco noted the sea’s existence sailing through the Pillars of Hercules: “Many seaweeds grow in the troughs between the waves, which slow the ships like bushes . ... Here the beasts of the sea move slowly hither and thither, and great monsters swim languidly among the sluggishly creeping ships.”
Not exactly a sailor’s mecca. And, ahoy there, matey, you’ve just entered the Bermuda Triangle, where anything can happen, and if you survive and make it home to shore, no one will ever believe you, for the Sargasso Sea is too mysterious a realm to be believed. Like Las Vegas, what happens there stays there. When Christopher Columbus sailed into the mats of sargassum, he tried fathoming the sea and found no bottom; he got out as fast as any sailor can through the thick matted morass.
Actually, the sea does have a bottom, but it’s miles down. Like the North Pacific subtropical gyre, the Sargasso Sea is calm, even as some of the world’s strongest currents—the Florida, Gulf Stream, North Equatorial, Antilles, and Caribbean—rage around its perimeter. And although the sea rotates and even changes position with weather and temperature fluctuations, like the North Pacific gyre, because of its languor and thick seaweed matting, most of what goes into the Sargasso remains in this eerie swirling seaweed forest.
Legends abound of lost ships and sailors who deserted their vessels—but where did they go?—while the ships were later found deserted. During Spanish maritime supremacy, when a ship got stuck in the Sargasso Sea, the crew would toss their war horses overboard, thus the name Horse Latitudes. One story tells of a slaver with only skeletons aboard. In 1840 the London Times reported the ship Rosalie had sailed into the Sargasso Sea before being found abandoned, no signs of life. One of the more oft-told Sargasso legends is that of the Ellen Austin, a schooner whose crew was said to have spotted another schooner, this one deserted. The Ellen Austin put some of its crew aboard the derelict schooner and the two ships sailed in tandem toward port. Two days later, the crew of the Ellen Austin noted the other schooner sailing erratically. The Ellen Austin sent more crew aboard only to discover the second crew missing. In 1857 the James B. Chester, a barque, was found deserted in the Sargasso Sea. When boarded, the rescuers found stale food set out on the mess table and chairs kicked over.
Pirates? Conniving sirens? Alien spaceships?
More contemporary myths include the deserted Connemara IV, sighted in 1955 drifting 140 miles off Bermuda. Between 1969 and 1982, numerous yachts and pleasure boats were found deserted in the Sargasso’s seaweed mats. In 1980 the SS Poet, bound for Gibraltar, disappeared in the Sargasso Sea. Although science and shipwrights did their best to explain away all superst
ition, the usual folklore spread. Why do some—but not all—of the ships transecting the Sargasso Sea disappear? The plot, as they say, thickens.
With its warm waters and thick seaweed mats, the Sargasso Sea is almost void of life farther up the food chain than seaweed—but its tangled mats of sargassum capture and retain whatever flotsam enters its realm. Regardless of the thousands of North Atlantic ship crossings each year, the Sargasso gives up less flotsam than the North Pacific Garbage Patch, which means that although it is smaller than the Pacific Patch, the Sargasso may contain the world’s richest mass and variety of flotsam.
Captain Moore, who has visited and researched the world’s three largest ocean gyres, has noted the same collections of flotsam in all of them, but he believes the Sargasso Sea is the most challenging of all.
Nike Flotsam
In May 1990, Hansa Carrier, a huge container vessel, encountered a severe storm in the North Pacific at about 48 degrees north latitude, 161 degrees west longitude, on its voyage from Korea to the United States. A large wave swept twenty-one shipping containers overboard. Five of the containers altogether held about eighty thousand Nike athletic shoes, including running shoes, children’s shoes, and hiking boots. Some, or possibly all five, containers broke open and spilled shoes into the storm-tossed waters.
About six months later, around late November, during an incoming tide, someone along the Washington coast found a Nike shoe washed up on the beach. Then another, and another. In the early months of 1991, Nikes began washing up along Vancouver Island, and then more Nikes showed up farther north in Queen Charlotte Sound. The count rose and rose until it reached several hundred Nikes—not necessarily exact matches in color, style, or size. The West Coast flotsamists’ grapevine reached down from Canada to Washington and Oregon, where shoes were also rolling in, and then finally to flotsamist Steve McLeod in Cannon Beach, Oregon.
