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.
Organic garbage, such as food, tree branches, and paper, gets broken down by bacteria and chemicals.
It returns to its original parts and re-enters the environment.
The difference is that now most of the garbage is plastic and plastic is inorganic.
Bacteria and chemicals in the seawater cannot break it down.
Plastic will therefore stay in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Moore learned some answers during return trips to the Great Garbage Patch.
Satellites don’t see the plastic because most of it hides under the ocean’s surface.
Some of the plastic comes from ships, but most of it is washed into the ocean from cities beside the Pacific.
The Great Garbage Patch is a real problem because the plastic in it is harmful to animals.