Study reveals that the Pacific Garbage Patch much heftier than thought — and it’s growing

The great mass of castaway plastic collecting in the northern Pacific Ocean is much larger than past estimates, and it’s growing, according to a new study. As a species, we use and discard millions of tons of plastic each year, and a lot of it ends up in the ocean, where researchers estimate that it kills or injures 100,000 marine animals each year. And while some of it gets broken up and sinks, scientists have found that gyres — swirling areas in the world’s oceans where circulating currents meet — collect a lot of this waste. A recent survey of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest of these collections, revealed that the aggregated plastic there weighs in at 79,000 metric tons (87,083 short tons). That’s between four and sixteen times heavier than past estimates. As we continue to produce even more plastic, the patch is growing exponentially heavier by the year, according to measurements of its size over time. A map showing the location of the Pacific Gyre, the location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Image by NOAA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. What’s more, most of the plastic, floating across an area larger than Mongolia at 1.6 million square kilometers (617,763 square miles), are pieces that are larger than 5 centimeters (2 inches) in length, and some 46 percent of the total mass is made up of old fishing nets. These “ghost nets” effectively become deadly floating traps for all kinds of sea life. “I knew there…

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