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I understood the garbage patch better once I understood it's misnamed. It's more like the great Pacific micro plastic slurry patch. It's a huge area, where the
by adamgordonbell 2y ago
I understood the garbage patch better once I understood it's misnamed. It's more like the great Pacific micro plastic slurry patch.
It's a huge area, where the water is filled with lots of tiny debris that is floating micro plastic chunks.
The plastic gets physically broken down by nature into sand size particles but then just gathers in that massive area due to water currents.
- nkurz 2y agoTrue, but "filled with lots" and "slurry" might also be misleading. It's many tiny particles of plastic across a really big area, with the pieces so small and far between that it's generally not visible from the surface. Here's John Cook's description: So how dense is it? Let’s assume 80,000 metric tons over an area twice the size of Texas. The area of Texas is 700,000 km² , so that’s 8 × 10^10 grams of trash over 1.4 × 10^12 square meters, or 57 milligrams per square meter. An empty water bottle weighs about 20 grams, and an American football field covers 5300 square meters, so this would be the same density of plastic as 15 empty water bottles scattered over a football field. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/09/10/density-of-the-gpgp/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/09/10/density-of-the-gpg... 1/20th of a gram per square meter spread suspended in the top few meters of water is real, but it doesn't look anything like a floating garbage pile.