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Place 06 · The North Pacific Garbage Patch · Chapter 7 of 7
Nobody’s Ocean
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is bigger than most countries on Earth, and it is not inside any of them.
About 15 minutes · 1 video · 1 live fishing map · 2 quick activities
Start here
Lines on the water
On land, every square meter belongs to some country. At sea, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, 1982) draws lines instead: a country’s full control fades step by step as you head offshore, and past 200 nautical miles, about 370 km, it runs out. Almost all of the garbage patch lies beyond those lines, on the high seas, which cover nearly two-thirds of the ocean.
Watch this
See it move
UN DOALOS — The BBNJ Agreement: Overview. Two minutes from the United Nations’ own ocean-law office on the High Seas Treaty: what it covers and why the high seas needed one. Dry, but it is the actual rulebook.
While you watch, look for
- Which parts of the ocean the agreement covers, and what BBNJ stands for
- The main things the agreement sets out to do
- Something you did not expect. Hold onto it.
The short version
Three things going on here
The zones
12, 24, 200
Out to 12 nautical miles, about 22 km, is a country’s territorial sea, where its laws apply much as they do on land; a contiguous zone out to 24 nautical miles lets it enforce customs and immigration rules. Out to 200 nautical miles is its exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, where it controls the fish, oil and minerals. Beyond that are the high seas, where a ship mostly follows the laws of the country whose flag it flies.
The rules
No dumping, on paper
Since 31 December 1988, MARPOL Annex V, an International Maritime Organization treaty, has banned ships from dumping plastic anywhere at sea; a 2013 update banned almost all garbage. The High Seas Treaty, adopted in 2023, took effect in January 2026 and gives countries a way to create protected areas on the high seas, though it is not a plastics law. Talks on a global plastics treaty began in 2022, but meetings in 2024 and 2025 ended without agreement, and as of September 2026 they are still going.
The fixes
Scoop it or stop it?
The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit, drags long floating barriers through the patch between two ships; it reports removing more than a million pounds of trash there from 2021 to 2024 and estimates a full cleanup would cost about $7.5 billion over ten years. Critics point out that nets cannot catch microplastics and that the neuston lives in the same water, and remember the bathtub: cleaning does not turn off the faucet. A 2021 study found that more than 1,000 rivers carry 80% of the plastic that rivers deliver to the sea, which is why many efforts now target rivers and lost fishing gear.
Photos: Sebastian Voortman, Serg Alesenko, Harry Ho / Pexels
Play with it
See who is fishing out there
This live map from Global Fishing Watch shows where fishing vessels have been working, worked out from the tracking signals ships broadcast to satellites. Zoom to the North Pacific between Hawaii and California, and if the EEZ boundaries are not showing, switch them on in the map’s reference layers.
Live map: Global Fishing Watch (globalfishingwatch.org), based on satellite tracking (AIS) of fishing vessels.
Two questions to answer while you are in there
- Is there fishing on the high seas of the North Pacific, outside every EEZ line? Whose rules do those boats follow out there?
- If most of the larger plastic in the patch comes from fishing, where could rules or new ideas make the biggest difference: on land, in the EEZs, or on the high seas?
Try it yourself
Check yourself
Try it
Whose Rules?
Eight quick calls: pick the zone or the rule that applies.
Try it · interactive
Whose Water?
Follow a strip of ocean from a coastline out to the high seas, through the territorial sea and the EEZ; place the garbage patch, a fishing boat and a cleanup vessel and see which rules apply where, with a timeline of the treaties.
Open Whose Water? in its own window (opens in a new tab).
Words you will hear
Four terms, that is all
High seas
Ocean beyond every country's 200-nautical-mile zone
Exclusive economic zone
Coastal country's resource zone to 200 nautical miles
MARPOL
International treaty against pollution from ships
High Seas Treaty
2023 agreement protecting life beyond national waters
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: Nobody's Ocean
Eight questions covering the video, the three cards, the four terms and the interactive above.
If you want more
Go deeper
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 17.17 — Protecting the Marine Environment — LibreTexts · 6 minutes
- NOAA National Ocean Service — What is the EEZ? — NOAA · 2 minutes
- International Maritime Organization — Prevention of Pollution by Garbage from Ships (MARPOL Annex V) — IMO · 5 minutes
Photo credits (Pexels): Skyler Sion, Lea Guerette, Sebastian Voortman, Serg Alesenko, Harry Ho.
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