Hoping to learn more about one of the most glaring examples of waste and environmental pollution on earth, a group of scientists will set sail from San Francisco today to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be twice the size of Texas.
The bobbing debris field, where currents swirl everything from discarded fishing line to plastic bottles into one soupy mess, is located about 1,000 miles west of California.
"This is a problem that is kind of out of sight, out of mind, but it is having devastating impacts on the ocean. I felt we needed to do something about it," said Mary Crowley, co-founder of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit expedition that is partnering on the voyage with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
Crowley — a Sausalito resident who owns a yacht chartering company, Ocean Voyages — has been sailing the Pacific Ocean for nearly 40 years.
"More and more now, you see signs of marine debris and plastic everyplace. You can be at very remote beaches, and you'll see plastic bottles, barrels, toys and a lot of plastic fishing nets," she said.
Dear God in Heaven, what a mess. We have NOT been cleaning up. If we keep this up, then we don't deserve to be here.
How is it that I can be surrounded by all this intense national pride; all this rhetoric about the great nation, best in the world, but large percentages of them do not want to pay taxes, or actually care for one another with universal health care. Doesn't America want to be number one in every sense? Health care for all, they could boast, and perhaps in time 'the best health care for all that the world has ever seen.' Who was that elected idiot that brought up the idea that we should be better neighbors to those who are ill? The ultimate show of that would be universal health care. Now, THAT would be neighborly.
