Conservationists have found a second huge plastic rubbish dump floating in the Pacific Ocean that covers close to 400,000 square miles — four times the area of Britain.
It was discovered by Charles Moore, an oceanographer and founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation which is dedicated to solving the issue of marine plastic pollution. He also discovered the North Pacific gyre rubbish patch in 1997, thought to be about the same size.
He and other researchers reported the new discovery while investigating plastic pollution in the South Pacific, off the coast of Chile. They reported that the plastic is bunched up and trapped in a known gyre; an area with circulating ocean currents.
However, rather than the usual plastic bags or bottles, most of the items in the newly discovered patch appear to be smaller than grains of rice. “We found a few larger items, occasionally a buoy and some fishing gear, but most of it was broken into bits,” Mr Moore told ResearchGate, a social networking site for scientists and researchers. He suggests that there are many millions of plastic particles per square mile in the new patch. They are notoriously difficult to clean up.
“This cloud of microplastics extends both vertically and horizontally,” said Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist. “It’s more like smog than a patch.”
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The microplastic particles may not be visible to the naked eye on the ocean surface, but were detected by Mr Moore’s expedition in the water samples they collected.
Henderson Island, in the same South Pacific region, has been described as the most plastic-polluted spot on the planet. Measuring barely 14 square miles, the uninhabited island is covered in roughly 38 million pieces of man-made rubbish, mostly plastic.
Mr Moore’s latest expedition ended in May and he is trying to identify the source of the plastic samples his team collected.
A recent study suggests that about 86 per cent of the plastic in the sea is carried there by no more than ten rivers, including seven in Asia, and two in Africa. Researchers from Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based foundation working to extract rubbish from the sea, determined that most of the floating plastics came from China, Indonesia and Burma.