Human garbage is everywhere

As if one Texas-sized area of plastic in the Pacific wasn’t enough, this winter, ocean researchers found a second patch big enough to rival the first—the great Atlantic garbage patch. It seems that no part of the world can escape the human touch.

From the Miami Herald:

The floating garbage - hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents - was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

The studies describe a soup of micro-particles similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California that researchers say is likely to exist in other places around the globe.

Some of the trash found in the ocean is recognizable stuff: water bottles, buckets, and crates, but most of the plastic is in small pieces. These pieces pick up chemicals from the water and are eaten by fish and water birds who mistake them for plankton. The plastic later turns up in the bellies of dead fish and birds.

It’s hard to measure the size of the two garbage patches since they shift with the currents, but scientists guess that the Pacific patch is around the size of Texas, and the Atlantic patch could be even larger.

The most appalling thing about discovering more of society’s waste swirling around in the ocean is just how pervasive our waste is. Researcher Anna Cummins, who documented the Atlantic patch, calls it a global problem. She told the Miami Herald:

It's shocking to see it firsthand. Nothing compares to being out there. We've managed to leave our footprint really everywhere.

Cummins' comment reminds me of one of climate change skeptics’ favorite arguments, that human beings can’t possibly effect something as large as climate change--there must be a natural cause. But as we find Starbucks cups littering our landscapes and bits of plastic swirling in our oceans, we also know that our sky contains carbon dioxide that comes from our factories and tailpipes. It’s hard to avoid the reach of human society.