Drive to rid ocean of swirling trash patch

SAN FRANCISCO: Researchers returned on Sunday from mapping and sampling a massive swirling cluster of trash floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as the Dutch-borne crew work to refine a clean-up strategy they will roll out globally.

The crew of the Ocean Cleanup, backed by volunteers in yachts, ventured into areas of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, a swirling mass of human-linked debris spanning hundreds of kilometres of open sea where plastic outnumbers organisms by factors in the hundreds.

The debris, concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents within an oblong-shaped “convergence zone”, lies near the Hawaiian Islands, about midway between Japan and the US West Coast. The trash ranges from microscopic pieces of plastic to large chunks.

Working for about a month, the group collected samples as small as a grain of sand and as large as discarded fishing nets weighing more than 900kg. They mapped the area, using aerial balloons and trawling equipment to locate samples, oceanographer Julia Reisser said.

“We did three types of surveys in 80 locations, and now we are working on completing an up-to-date estimate of the size of the patch, making a chart of hotspots and publishing our findings by mid-2016,” she said.

The reconnaissance trip is the brainchild of Ocean Cleanup’s 21-year-old founder, Boyan Slat, and backed financially by Salesforce.com’s chief executive Marc Benioff, among other philanthropic and crowdsourcing initiatives. – Reuters