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Place 06 · The North Pacific Garbage Patch · Chapter 1 of 7
An Island That Isn’t There
You could sail straight through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on a sunny afternoon and never know you had been there.
About 15 minutes · 1 video · 1 live data chart · 2 quick activities
Start here
Soup, not an island
The headlines promised a floating continent of trash. What is actually out there, according to NOAA, is “more like pepper flakes swirling in a soup”: trillions of small plastic pieces spread through the water, plus the occasional net, crate or buoy. It is real, it is big, and it is almost invisible, which turns out to be the whole problem.
Watch this
See it move
NOAA National Ocean Service (usoceangov) — TRASH TALK: What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Two minutes from NOAA on what the patch is and, more importantly, what it is not.
While you watch, look for
- What the video compares a garbage patch to, instead of an island
- What moves the debris into one place, and whether this is the only patch
- Something you did not expect. Hold onto it.
The short version
Three things going on here
The pieces
Trillions of tiny bits
A 2018 survey led by Laurent Lebreton estimated about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the patch. About 94% of them are microplastics, smaller than 5 mm, yet together they make up only about 8% of the weight. Most are too small to notice from a ship, and satellite photos show no patch at all.
The weight
Mostly nets and crates
The weight is in the big stuff: more than three-quarters of the patch’s plastic mass comes from pieces bigger than 5 cm, and lost fishing nets alone make up at least 46%. A 2022 follow-up study estimated that 75 to 86% of the larger floating plastic could come from fishing, and most of the pieces with a readable label came from Japan, China, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan.
The place
Between Hawaii and California
The patch sits in the middle of the North Pacific’s great loop of currents, its center wandering from year to year around 32°N 145°W, and covers an estimated 1.6 million km². Captain Charles Moore made it famous in 1997, sailing home from Hawaii to California through water that kept filling with bits of plastic. It is not alone: a western patch lies closer to Japan, and every ocean basin has its own collection zone.
Photos: Alfo Medeiros, Maria Lucia Sampaio, Lara Jameson / Pexels
Play with it
Which ocean holds the most?
This chart from Our World in Data shows an estimate of how much plastic floats on the surface of each part of the world ocean, from tiny fragments to big pieces. Find the North Pacific, compare it with the other basins, and hover over the bars to read the numbers.
Interactive chart: Our World in Data, “Surface plastic mass across the world’s oceans,” from Eriksen et al. (2014), PLOS ONE.
Two questions to answer while you are in there
- Which basin has the most floating plastic by weight, and roughly what fraction of the world total is that?
- The North Pacific does not have the most people living around it. What else could explain why so much floating plastic ends up there?
Try it yourself
Check yourself
Try it
Fact or Myth?
Eight things people say about the garbage patch. Sort the facts from the myths.
Try it · interactive
Gyre Collector
Release floating debris from Japan, California, Hawaii and a fishing fleet, run the years forward, and watch the North Pacific’s currents sweep it into the patch between Hawaii and California.
Open the Gyre Collector in its own window (opens in a new tab).
Words you will hear
Four terms, that is all
Marine debris
Persistent human-made solid trash in the sea
Microplastic
Piece of plastic smaller than 5 mm
Ghost net
Lost fishing net that keeps on catching
Garbage patch
Area where currents concentrate floating debris
Check your understanding
Practice the whole chapter
Everything in this chapter, in eight quick questions. Retry as often as you like. Read the feedback on every answer, right or wrong, because that is where the learning is.
Practice
Practice: An Island That Isn't There
Eight questions covering the video, the three cards, the four terms and the interactive above.
If you want more
Go deeper
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 9.21 — What is a Garbage Patch? — LibreTexts · 5 minutes
- A Student's Guide to Tropical Marine Biology 3.1 — Plastics in Our Oceans — LibreTexts · 8 minutes
- NOAA Marine Debris Program — Garbage Patches — NOAA · 5 minutes
Photo credits (Pexels): David Gonzales, Alfo Medeiros, Maria Lucia Sampaio, Lara Jameson.
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