A growing island of plastic rubbish is in the Pacific ocean. It is twice the size of the United States! This large collection of trash stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the Northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost to Japan. The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is more like a plastic soup. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by Charles Moore, an American oceanographer, in 1997, as he was traveling between Hawaii and Los Angeles on a yacht. He steered his boat into a part of the ocean usually avoided by sailors. This part of the ocean has little wind and is called the North Pacific Gyre. Here, thousands of miles from land, he found himself surrounded by pieces of plastic trash day after day as he steered his yacht through the area over a week's time period. The floating trash lies just below the surface of the ocean and has not been detected by satellite photography. The only way to see it is to sail through it.