Halloween Horrors: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Image captured from source, San Francisco Chronicle

And, now for something really scary! I remember reading about the phenomenon of "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" in the days before I had a blog. It was really quite alarming. There is an enormous patch of plastic and other garbage collecting in the waters between California and Hawaii. How enormous? How does twice the size of Texas grab you? And, much like The Blob, it's getting BIGGER.

It reminds me of the days when I was in debt. You just want to ignore the problem, thinking, "it's so huge, what could I even do to fix it?" And as you know, that sort of thinking (if you were or are in that situation) only makes the problem worse. Much worse. So what are we going to do about it?

[Excerpt]

Feds want to survey, possibly clean up vast garbage pit in Pacific

The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stewy body of plastic and marine debris that floats an estimated 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, is a shape-shifting mass far too large, delicate and remote to ever be cleaned up, according to a researcher who recently returned from the area.

But that might not stop the federal government from trying.
Charles Moore, the marine researcher at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach who has been studying and publicizing the patch for the past 10 years, said the debris - which he estimates weighs 3 million tons and covers an area twice the size of Texas - is made up mostly of fine plastic chips and is impossible to skim out of the ocean. . .

Read on at: San Francisco Chronicle