Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A zone in the North Pacific between California and Hawaii where the ocean's gyre gathers floating plastic. Predicted in 1988 and noticed by a yachtsman in 1997, it is not an island of rubbish but a thin scatter, mostly fishing nets and fragments: a 2018 survey put it at about 79,000 tonnes over 1.6 million square kilometres.

Dated events and their evidence

1988 CE mainstream
a paper by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that floating plastic will collect in the North Pacific Gyre, extrapolating from plastic measured in the Sea of Japan and from Alaska-based surveys of 1988 source
1997 CE mainstream
Charles Moore, sailing home through the North Pacific Gyre after the Transpacific Yacht Race, comes upon a vast stretch of floating plastic; the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, whom he alerts, names the region the Eastern Garbage Patch source
1999 CE mainstream
net tows in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre find 335,000 plastic items and 5.1 kg of plastic per square kilometre, about ten times the abundance in samples from the 1980s source
2009 CE mainstream
August 2009: the SEAPLEX expedition of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Project Kaisei finds plastic in 100 consecutive samples along a 2,700 km track through the patch source
2015 CE mainstream
The Ocean Cleanup crosses the patch with 30 vessels and 652 survey nets, collecting 1.2 million pieces; in 2016 an aircraft with lidar counts the rarer large debris source
2018 CE mainstream
Lebreton and colleagues estimate that at least 79 thousand tonnes (45 to 129 thousand) of plastic float in an area of 1.6 million square kilometres, four to sixteen times earlier figures: over three quarters of the mass is debris larger than 5 cm and at least 46 per cent is fishing nets source

Where

38.0000° N, 145.0000° W

The point is Wikipedia's position for the patch, 38 N, 145 W. The patch has no sharp edge: it spreads over roughly 135 to 155 W and 35 to 42 N in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and the 1.6 million square kilometre estimate of 2018 is a modelled area, not a boundary anyone can see.

Sources

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Each event carries Aion's own evidence grade (mainstream, disputed or speculative). This page repeats what the globe shows for this place.