The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting greater. Twice the size of Texas, the floating mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic is up to 16 times larger than previously thought, according to scientists who performed an aerial survey.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this plastic blight in the Pacific Ocean is still growing at what the researchers called an "exponential" pace.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP for short, is an accumulation of junk that has collected in the waters between California and Hawaii. The concentration of floating plastic in the patch ranges from tens to hundreds of kilograms per square kilometer. But much of it is hidden from the naked eye, partly because some of the plastic has been broken down into smaller and smaller bits over time. (It is not, as its name may suggest, an island.)

Read Amina Khan’s story from The Los Angeles Times - “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic.”

(The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is analogous with climate change - we can’t see it and therefore we do nought about it, nor do we care - Robert McLean)