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Environment  - The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives

Pollution - Anything added to the environment that is harmful to living things

Debris - Bits and pieces of rubbish and trash

Garbage - Any matter that is no longer wanted or needed; trash

Waste - Any materials unused and rejected as worthless or unwanted

Litter - Rubbish in the street

Gyres - Huge circular moving current systems that dominate the surfaces of the oceans

Biodegradable - Capable of being readily decomposed into harmless substances by microorganisms

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The amount of debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch accumulates because much of it is not biodegradable. Many plastics, for instance, do not wear down; they simply break into tinier and tinier pieces.

For many people, the idea of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of trash floating on the ocean. In reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch sits near the surface of the ocean. Dense debris can sink centimeters or even several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure.

No one knows how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is too large for scientists to trawl. In addition, not all of the trash floats on the surface. Denser debris can sink centimeters or even several meters beneath the surface, making the vortex’s area nearly impossible to measure.

80 percent of plastic in the ocean is estimated to come from land-based sources, with the remaining 20 percent coming from boats and other marine sources. These percentages vary by region, however. A 2018 study found that synthetic fishing nets made up nearly half the mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, due largely to ocean current dynamics and increased fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean.

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Marine debris can prevent algae and plankton, the photosynthetic producers in the marine food web, from receiving enough sunlight to create nutrients. When these tiny organisms are threatened, the entire food web is put at risk—first-order consumers that eat the plankton, such as jellies; second-order consumers that eat the jellies, such as turtles; and apex predators such as sharks.

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Marine debris can be very harmful to marine life in the gyre. For instance, loggerhead sea turtles often mistake plastic bags for jellies, their favorite food. Albatrosses mistake plastic resin pellets for fish eggs and feed them to chicks, which die of starvation or ruptured organs.

Marine debris can also disturb marine food webs in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. As microplastics and other trash collect on or near the surface of the ocean, they block sunlight from reaching plankton and algae below. Algae and plankton are the most common autotrophs, or producers, in the marine food web. Autotrophs are organisms that can produce their own nutrients from carbon and sunlight.

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The marine debris of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can devastate marine life in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The stomach contents of this unfortunate albatross include plastic marine debris fed to the chick by its parents.