Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Once waterborne, debris becomes mobile. Flotsam can be blown by the wind, or follow the flow of ocean currents, often ending up in the middle of oceanic gyres where currents are weakest. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is one such example of this, comprising a vast region of the North Pacific Ocean rich with anthropogenic wastes. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic. The gyre contains approximately six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton per cubic meter of seawater. The oceans may contain as much as one hundred million tons of plastic.
Islands situated within gyres frequently have coastlines flooded by waste that washes ashore; prime examples are Midway and Hawaii. Clean-up teams around the world patrol beaches to attack this environmental threat.
Read more about this topic: Marine Debris
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“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
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—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
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—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)