Needle in a Landfill
▻http://www.onearth.org/articles/2014/04/airplane-goes-missing-over-ocean-world-finds-lots-of-its-lost-trash
For over three weeks, the world has been searching for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, with no physical sign of the plane or its 239 passengers anywhere. But what search parties have found, over and over again, is a lot of trash floating in some very remote corners of the ocean.
Almost immediately after the plane went missing on March 8, authorities spotted two unrelated oil slicks in the South China Sea, and since then, flotsam has repeatedly led investigators astray. Over the weekend, the search area, now in the Indian Ocean, shifted 700 miles in order to inspect a new patch of debris, but that turned out to be discarded fishing gear. So while the world waits for some trace of the lost jetliner, another disheartening subplot has been emerging from the narrative—our oceans are full of all kinds of crap.
Big crap. Little crap. Microscopic crap.
You’ve no doubt heard of the Great Pacific garbage patch, that whirling, swirling carpet of refuse often described as being the size of Texas. Well, guess what? The Indian Ocean has one of those bad boys, too. In fact, there are five major marine collections of plastic and debris—one for every one of the five ocean’s main gyres. And thanks to the anti-ocean pollution organization, 5 Gyres, you can watch how the trash patches have grown with time:
