The So-Called Garbage Patch, Post 1

I get a lot of questions about the so-called Garbage Patch. Here are some answers. In the summer of 2005, when I began my researches into the castaway toys, I'd never heard of the Garbage Patch. Nor, I suspect, had most people. Since then the phenomenon has gone through the familiar life-cycles of a news story. First came the sensationalism. Then the story began to smell of Old News. Then came the debunking. By now, the Garbage Patch is rumored to be a myth. It isn't, though the name is misleading and a portion of fancy has muddled the facts. That's usually how it goes with storytelling, journalistic or otherwise, especially when it comes to the sea. (Melville: "In maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.")

I first learned of the Garbage Patch from the man who named it, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the oceanographer whose idea it was to turn container spills into drift experiments. The relevant passage from my book:

[Some of the toys] would drift into the gyre's becalmed heart where the prevailing atmospheric high has created what Ebbesmeyer christened "the Garbage Patch"—a purgatorial eddy in the waste stream that covers, Ebbesmeyer told me, as much of the earth's surface as Texas. . . . . "It's like Jupiter's red spot," he said. "It's one of the great features of the planet Earth but you can't see it." He'd never visited the Garbage Patch himself, but he had received eyewitness reports from sailors. "They'd be sailing through there with their motors on—not sailing, motors on," he said. "No wind, glassy calm water, and they start spotting refrigerators and tires, and glass balls as far as you could see." (Moby-Duck, 37)

Note that stock phrase, "as far as you could see." Ebbesmeyer's account was strongly influenced by that of sailboat captain and self-trained oceanographer, Charles Moore, who had in fact visited the Garbage Patch. In 2003, for the readers of Natural History, this is how Moore described what he'd seen there:

"As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic."

In November of 2007, I joined the crew of Moore's research vessel on a voyage off Hawaii. By then  second-hand accounts were describing an island of plastic in the North Pacific, or a vortex of plastic reminiscent of Poe's maelstrom, or an "evil" plastic Leviathan. Off Hawaii, Moore was hunting for plastic with his trawl net. I was hunting for a glimpse of the adequate reality to which the wild rumors had clung. We both found what we went looking for--sort of.

More later.