Mid-Pacific Gyre

• Category: Marine and Oceanic Biomes.
• Geographic Location: Pacific Ocean.
• Summary: The Mid-Pacific Gyre contains a vast floating mass of plastic and other human debris that creates a major environmental hazard for seabirds, sea turtles, and sea mammals—and potentially for humans through the oceanic food chain.

One of the five vast oceanic gyres, or roughly circular current systems, the structure of the Mid-Pacific Gyre is formed by four major currents. Together, they rotate through the entire North Pacific Ocean in a generally clockwise motion. The currents—North Equatorial, Kuroshio, North Pacific, and California—stretch for thousands of miles, influenced by and influencing air and water temperature, humidity, air pressure, and the biota that inhabit the Pacific, its islands, and continental shorelines.

In more detail: The California Current moves toward Central America to meet the North Equatorial Current on the Mexican Coast before heading to Asia as the North Equatorial Current. From these equatorial waters and along the coast of Japan, the system picks up warmth as it becomes the Kuroshio Current. This segment flows northeastward to confront the cold subarctic Oyashio current; their merger fuels the warm North Pacific Current, which flows across to its encounter with North America, where it splits into the northbound Alaska Current and the California Current, completing the gyre.

With few major island chains or continental masses, and with generally low winds, the surface water of the gyre tends to push floating matter toward its low-energy center. In recent decades, this trend has precipitated a phenomenon that has been variously dubbed the Trash Vortex, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch, and other monikers.

This vast extent of mostly human-generated debris is composed of up to 90 percent polymer or plastic materials. Nearly half the debris consists of synthetic fishing nets. The rest consist of mundane products of consumer society, the leading recorded items include plastic bottles, cups, bags, and packing materials. Some estimates are that up to 10 million tons of plastic materials enter the world’s oceans each year; perhaps one-quarter to one-third of this flotsam finds its way ultimately to this vortex. While much of the material degrades into smaller particles, virtually none of it is naturally recyclable into the environment. Instead of decomposing, then, it remains a threat for marine organisms of many sizes and scales.

Although this diffuse Pacific Ocean garbage patch was first observed in the 1970s, it came to wide public attention in 1997 when Captain Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation of Long Beach, California, observed the mass and began to take measurements. In many samples scooped out of the ocean, Moore discovered that there were six times more plastic in the water than plankton.

Aquatic Danger

The garbage gyre presents a dire threat—beyond the disturbing appearance of floating trash such as fishnets, clothing, bottles, plastic bags, and cigarette lighters. Believing that the larger items are prey or plants, many seabirds and sea turtles eat the plastic—which in many cases has absorbed toxins during its manufacture, its intended use, and/or after disposal. Digestive processes can release many such toxins. The chips of plastic also can cause digestive, pulmonary, and/or respiratory blockage that eventually kills the creature that ingests it.

In this way, dead fish, birds, and marine mammals also become caught up in the vortex. Scientists have estimated that around the world, more than 1 million seabirds and in excess of 100,000 mammals and sea turtles die each year from ingesting plastic that floats out to sea. Jellyfish, too, may eat the poisoned debris; they in turn are eaten by fish. When fish containing the concentrated and released toxins are caught by commercial fishers, those fish can then taint the human food chain. Fishing nets in the gyre are dangerous for animals that become entangled in them. Animals who cannot free themselves, die.

In addition to the plastic and debris that end up in various surface garbage patches of the world’s oceans, researchers believe up to 70 percent of ocean debris sinks to the bottom, winding up on the ocean floor. No one is sure what havoc that debris may be creating for the ecosystems deep in the oceans.

Efforts are being made to clean up the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Beginning in 2021, the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization, deployed a mission called System 002. By July 2022, it had collected 239,259 pounds (108,526 kilograms) of plastic from the gyre. With adequate resources and a reduction in the inflow from rivers, the Ocean Cleanup believes that it can remove 90 percent of the plastic waste by 2040.

Mitigation and Prevention

Many scientists believe that the only solution to the issue of floating garbage vortices is to prevent plastic and other debris from ending up in the ocean in the first place. Even if that task were accomplished, it is possible that current damage could persist for thousands of years, because plastic does not decompose.

Raising and activating public awareness will be crucial to get anything meaningful done about this threat. Environmentalist Moore, still active more than 15 years after his first discoveries, has concentrated his efforts on investigating the phenomenon, and informing both the scientific community and the public about the extent of the problem. Moore and his Algalita Foundation team, always seeking to better map the garbage gyre, think that it may be 100 feet (30 meters) deep or more.

Various suggestions for keeping plastic out of the ocean include recycling and reusing plastic, opting for items that use fewer or no plastic materials in either content or packaging, and initiating local cleanup activities on all the beaches, estuaries, lagoons, and marine coasts and waterways of the world. In one such local effort, for example, Mary Crowley, who owns a California-based boat-chartering business, in 2010 launched Project Kaisei to call attention to the Great Garbage Patch by assembling a team of volunteers to begin hauling debris away from the patch one boatload at a time.

Bibliography

Blomberg, Lindsey E. “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Environmental Magazine 22, no. 3 (2011).

Boyan, Slat. "First 100,000 KG Removed from the Great Pacific." The Ocean Cleanup, 25 July 2022, theoceancleanup.com/updates/first-100000-kg-removed-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

Coe, James M. Marine Debris: Sources, Impacts, and Solutions. New York: Springer, 1997.

Kostigen, Thomas M. “The World’s Largest Dump: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Discover, 9 July 2008, . Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

Perkins, Sid. “Oceans Yield Huge Haul of Plastic.” Science News 177, no. 7 (2010).