Hey, everybody, Like so many of you, my love of learning didn't just stop when I finished school. I wouldn't be doing this show otherwise. That is why I'm excited about the new The Great Courses Plus video learning service. You get unlimited access to thousands of the Great Courses online lectures on so many topics taught by the top professors.
And I really want you to try this out The Great Courses Plus because they're giving our listeners a special chance to watch hundreds of their courses for free, including this course that I just watched, called The Inexplicable Universe Unsolved Mysteries. This is presented by the well respected astrophysicist Neil Degrass Tyson. You guys all know n d T. Right. He explores some of the universe's biggest mysteries in an engaging, fascinating manner, and he talks about concepts like black holes,
quantum foam, and string theory. I'm a big fan of The Great Courses Plus and I want you to try it at too, so as one of brain Stuff's listeners. When you sign up, you'll immediately get one month free to start any lectures you want. Start your free trial today by going to the Great Courses plus dot Com slash brain Stuff. That's the Great Courses plus dot Com slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, it's Christian Seger. I got a question for you.
Where is the biggest garbage dump on Earth? It's only miles away from California's shores, right in the Pacific Ocean, and it's called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. It affects our ecosystem by presenting hazards to marine life and the fishing industry. Fun right, So what is this Great Pacific garbage Patch? Well, it was found by a racing boat captain named Charles Moore. When he was saying in from Hawaii to California. More noticed millions of pieces of plastics
surrounding his ship. And the thing is this garbage patch. It isn't really that thick. You can't walk on it, you can sail through it. Most of the debris isn't on the water's surface. Actually, it's more like this plastic soup plastic to zooplankton. There is a ratio of six to one there in the northern Pacific Ocean. There's an ocean gyre, a system of circular ocean currents formed by both the Earth's wind patterns and the rotation of the planet, and the one in the North Pacific moves slowly in
a clockwise spiral of currents. It forms an area of about twenty million square kilometers that's seven point seven million square miles. Now the gyre actually forms two garbage patches. There's the Western and Eastern Pacific garbage patches. The eastern one floats between Hawaii and California, and it's twice the side of Texas. The western one floats between Hawaii and Japan. Now they're connected by a six thousand mile long current
called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Trash debris accumulates there as well, and it acts kind of like a highway between the two patches. Fishermen and sailors rarely travel through this because there is a lack of fish and only some gentle breezes. Nearby land masses, however, receive large amounts of this trash on their shores. Hawaii, for example, some of the beaches there are buried in five to ten feet of trash. Some say they can't quantify how much trash there actually
is in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Others claim it holds three point five million tons of waste. There are four other similar gyres in the world's ocean, and all of them hold trash. So where does the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from? Well, eight scent of ocean trash originates on land, mainly in North America
and Asia. Rivers and overflowing storm drains carry garbage out to the ocean, and also some of it comes from the litter that are on beaches now, Trash from America's coast takes six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Trash from Asia, however, takes only a year to get there, and it's mostly made of plastic. Plastic has been only around for a little over a century, and today we use two hundred billion pounds of it a year. Ten
percent of that ends up in the ocean. Plastic makes up roughly eighty percent of ocean waste, and every square mile of ocean hosts forty six thousand pieces of plastic. These pieces are often less than a millimeter wide, so for example, think of like plastic bags, or bottle caps or water bottles or styrofoam cups all of those breaking down.
Like take a plastic bottle for example. It takes five hundred years to break something like that down, so it's out there for a long time, and they don't wear down, they just break into smaller pieces because of sun exposure. These tiny pieces are called mermaid tears or nerdles. I
know it sounds cute, but not so much. The plastics in the ocean have different levels of toxicity, and the pieces concentrate and absorbed chemicals and poisons that are also now in the water, like an oil spill for example. The pieces also leach out pollutants, photodegradation, leeches out colorance, and chemicals linked to environmental and health problems into the water. All right, so how about some examples of how these
cause hazards for animals. Well, when animals eat the plastic, both kinds of chemicals go into their bodies, and these chemicals could be passed up the food chain. Plastic garbage kills one million birds a year and a hundred thousand ocean animals like dolphins and turtles. Now, let's take an albatross for instance. It ingests lots of plastic trash on Midway Island alone. They can give birth to five hundred
thousand chicks a year. Two hundred thousand of these chicks die because their parents accidentally feed them plastic and what happens is that punctures their digestive tracks, killing them. Same with loggerhead turtles. They mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, for instance, or seals. They get trapped in fishing nuts and drown. There's a term for this, it's actually called ghost fishing an algae. Because microplastics block sunlight, algae and plankton communities
are also threatened. This could affect the entire ecosystem or food web, with less food to go around in general, making seafood less available for humans at the top of the food chain. So how do we prevent this? How do we clean up this great Pacific garbage patch? Well, trawling the ocean for trash is just impossible, and it would also harm the plankton that's already there. It would take sixty seven ships a year to clean up less
than one percent of the North Pacific. So the best thing that we can do is manage waste on land, try to find alternatives to plastic, use biodegradables instead, expand recycling programs, to accommodate for more types of plastic and buy fewer plastic items, or you can always recycle. Check out the brain suff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com