It took 30 vessels, a month at sea, and one 171 foot mothership for the Ocean Cleanup Project to learn what they’re up against when setting out to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s the first time anybody has quantified something such as how much Japanese tsunami debris is still in the patch, using trawls and aerial surveys. The overall objective was to find how much plastic trash is floating around in the area they’ve been working to clean since 2013. In fact, the survey was so big they had to call it a Mega Expedition.
“I’ve studied plastic in all the world’s oceans, but never seen any area as polluted as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Dr. Julia Reisser, Lead Oceanographer said on The Ocean Cleanup website. “With every trawl we completed, thousands of miles from land, we just found lots and lots of plastic.” And according to Boyan Slat, the man who designed the cleanup, finding and cleaning up the plastic now is only part of the potential problem.”The vast majority of the plastic in the garbage patch is currently locked up in large pieces of debris,” Slat says. “But UV light is breaking it down into much more dangerous microplastics, vastly increasing the amount of microplastics over the next few decades if we don’t clean it up. It really is a ticking time bomb.”
Now that the crew is back on land their next task is to analyze research samples. Sadly the month at sea turned up more plastic in the Pacific Patch than they’d originally expected. That, added to the fact that the cleanup expedition is now set to launch in 2020, leaves the Ocean Cleanup with a hefty load of preparation in front of them.
