In the middle of the ocean, a thousand miles from the nearest town, the sea of garbage stretched as far as Moore could see.
Moore and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a researcher, began calling this area the Great Garbage Patch.
In the 1990s, he studied shipping accidents that spilled big loads of sports shoes and plastic bath toys into the ocean.
The movement of the objects revealed where currents flow in some parts of the Pacific.
Oceanographers are not surprised that garbage collects in the North Pacific.
A pattern of winds and currents, called the North Pacific Gyre, gathers this garbage.
Water in the gyre goes round and round in a clockwise pattern, and anything that gets into the middle of it is trapped.