Long before traveling to Australia for the third International Solar Cities Congress this past February, I knew that water swirls counterclockwise from a sink south of the equator, versus clockwise in Florida (and everywhere in the United States). I knew that it is caused by the Earth’s rotation and recently learned the name of the cause, the Coriolis Effect. When I finally drained a sink in the lovely seaside city of Sydney, I grinned.
Before I had the chance, though, I sat on the longest airline flight of my life, Honolulu to Sydney. I stared out the window for much of the journey and, oddly, the Pacific Ocean didn’t seem so deep from cruising altitude. The Pacific Ocean is big! My five-hour flight from California to Hawaii, the day before I flew to Sydney, proved that!
Because of this, of course, the Pacific Ocean has immense currents. One of the largest is known as the North Pacific Gyre. It, too, is caused by the Coriolis Effect and originates from the same Latin root which gives us the word gyrate. The North Pacific Gyre spans thousands of miles. Imagine a slow-moving undercurrent from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii. Yes, it’s that big and it is in constant motion, just as the whole planet is.
Well, it turns out, although I did not see this with my own eyes from cruising altitude, that the North Pacific Gyre is so large and powerful that it attracts floating debris which happens to land in the ocean, anywhere in the ocean, and carries it to a central point, forming an immense garbage dump. What’s worse, because the North Pacific Gyre is so immense, more than one of these dumps exists.
Pretty much any debris which can float and doesn’t degrade in sea water winds up in these dumps. The one which scientists have begun to calculate covers an area greater than the Continental United States and continues to grow!
How does all of this debris splash into the Pacific? Much of it comes from people too thoughtless or careless to dispose of their debris properly. Some of it literally blows or washes into the ocean when trash cans and landfills overflow. The list of ugly sources is quite long but in the end, we have managed to despoil one of the most pristine areas on the planet with all sorts of plastic, plastic water bottles, plastic shopping bags, plastic pails, plastic fishing line, etc.
The bad news doesn’t stop there, nor the difficulty in solving the problem. No, you see, where the situation becomes really desperate is that many portions of the ocean, including a large chunk of the North Pacific Gyre, will be dead long before the trillions of gallons of water from melting polar ice caps spill into the sea and submerge Florida, Tuvalu, Alaskan villages and so on. That’s because we are turning the oceans into a variation of soda pop even though the plastic bottles which float there are empty.
Next time, I will explain the odd role of carbonic acid and how you can test my assertions under the hood of your car.
Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line
Corbett Kroehler
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