You might have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That almost continental sized accumulation of plastic debris situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii. Now, you can hop over and see its cousin – on the Atlantic Ocean. The growing garbage patch on the Atlantic has been ignored till now.

Though, the Atlantic patch still hasn’t reserved a moniker, it won’t be long before it catches the eye with its 520,000 bits of trash per square mile. The Pacific garbage Patch has nearly 1.9 million bits per square mile. This new patch is located hundreds of miles off the North American coast. The patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—approximately the distance from Cuba to Virginia.

Similar to its Pacific brethren, the patch is an environmental risk for fish, seabirds, and other marine animals that accidentally feed on the wish-wash. And it’s a tremendous eye-sore if you are trawling by.
Where is all the rubbish floating out from?

Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, collated and studied 22 years worth of data collected by students participating in her association’s SEA Semester academic program. The debris chief constituents are tiny pieces of trash, each one-tenth the size of a paper clip. The sources are consumer products that are blown out from open landfills by the wind and carried into the ocean waters.

Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu has tracked the currents that carry trash to the Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches. He used satellite data culled from floating sensors.

His studies indicate that currents often change in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and then some of the debris escape towards the Hawaiian Islands. Pieces that don’t reach Hawaii waters eventually cycle back into the Pacific garbage patch.

Sensors deployed to study Atlantic’s currents show a similar pattern.

Let’s leave the last word for the Sea Education Association’s marine chemist Giora Proskurowski who says that finding plastic so far out in either ocean is sobering, because it forces us into physical confrontation with the human impact on the environment.

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