Plastic disaster happen in our common ocean

Researchers have found a 2.5 million square-kilometer bulk plastic waste bin in the southern Pacific.
In 1997, the American oceanographer Charles Moore was on his way home from Hawaii to California in the sailboat. Far out on the sea, without land in sight, he suddenly discovered that he was surrounded by a plastic rubbish. For a full week, Moore sailed in this steamy plastic mall which later became known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a 1.4 million square-kilometer plastic soup held together by the ocean currents.

Now Moore has made a disappointing discovery: A similar rubbish field exists in the south of the Pacific. Recently, Charles Moore returned from an expedition in the waters around Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island to take water samples and check the concentration of plastic there. The calculations indicate that in the south of the Pacific there is a 2.5 million square kilometer field of plastic particles, writes the BBC. 

"We found some major objects, such as bends and fishing gear, but for the most part it was broken down to small pieces," Moore told the ResearchGate website. 

Like the northern plastic soup, it can be merged to the south with a contaminated cloud made of micro-plastic, plastic painted to still smaller pieces of waves and sunlight. "We have not done analyzes at the laboratory yet, but the visual impression is that we are talking about a huge area in the southern Pacific, where there are millions of plastic particles per kilometer," said Moore. 

According to figures from 2016, 12 million tonnes of plastic waste are thrown into the world's sea every year. The consequence is that in some places there are larger amounts of plastic than plankton in the ocean. If poison from the trash enters our food chain, the trash can also prove to be dangerous to humans. According to the project "Save the North Sea", about one million seabirds and one hundred thousand mammals and turtles die each year as a result of eating or being damaged by plastic waste. 

Plastic waste is currently found in 90 per cent of world seabirds.