The crew of the Alguita journeyed to the middle of the Pacific to visit the largest trash dump.

Somewhere between San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands, a catamaran named the Alguita (“little kelp plant” in Spanish) braves the winter storms. It’s mid-February—halfway through a one-month mission—and her six-member crew is suffering bouts of seasickness as inclement weather rocks the small vessel.

When the sky clears, a spectacular horizon stretches out in all directions, and the Alguita’s aluminum hull slices through the clear water.

At least the water looks clear.

In actuality, this unbounded expanse contains an enormous concentration of man-made, nondegradable trash. It’s bad enough that the boat’s captain, Charles Moore, has created a new name for the water in the area: “plastic soup.”

On the surface, bags and bottles float by. But the real problem lies beneath, in the billions of pebble-sized particles of plastic known as nurdles, which saturate the water, bind to dangerous chemicals and, by wedging themselves inside the tissues of marine creatures, work their way up the food chain.
Meet the crew of the ship in our rollover feature.This sprawling region that the Alguita has been sailing is often referred to as “The Eastern Garbage Patch.” In the past, publications have gotten the story wrong, mistakenly referring to “an island of waste twice the size of Texas.”

There is no such visible island of trash. In fact, photos taken from space of what is properly named the Central Pacific Gyre reflect pure blue waters.

The Gyre is a roughly oval-shaped vortex of air and water that spans approximately ten million square miles. There, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, currents rotate clockwise, creating a dangerous high-pressure stretch that most boats expressly avoid.

But Moore specifically sought out this region in order to study what is widely believed to be the highest oceanic concentration of plastic on the planet.

Because it changes shape with the weather and seasons, the boundaries of the Gyre are difficult to define. The high-pressure system that hangs above it and makes its winter waters especially calm encourages the accumulation of trash that is brought in on its strong, circular currents. In fact, the waters are so calm and polluted that on its recent voyage, the Alguita sometimes caught less air in her sails than plastic in her trawls.

“We’re going to the place where the problem is greatest, because we want to study the interaction between plastic and creatures,” Moore wrote in an email sent during the February trip. “As we write, we are adjusting our course to retrieve a large plastic fishing float, and we have indeed encountered the highest levels of debris yet seen.”

Moore happened upon this nightmare of synthetic garbage while crossing the Pacific in 1997. “I couldn’t go on deck without seeing some type of plastic object float by,” he wrote. “I became alarmed at the quantity of trash, which I guesstimated was one-half pound per 100 square meters. At that rate, it would be as big as Puente Hills, the largest landfill in Los Angeles. I had sailed to Hawaii as a 14-year-old boy, and I never remembered seeing anything like that.”

The level of pollution made such an impression on Moore that he chose to devote his life to researching and publicizing the issue.

In photographs taken on the Alguita’s voyage, the stunning beaches of Hawaii are shown heaped with trash that had escaped the Gyre.

The scientists and naturalists who clear the beaches have also reported an increase in the number of cormorant corpses washing up on shore. The sea birds starve to death, their stomachs crammed full of cigarette lighters, bottle caps and plastic twine that they ingest while feeding in the polluted waters.

During its trip, the boat’s holds filled with growing samples of plastic. Because of the currents and the remote location of the Gyre, only nimble research vessels, like the Alguita, are able to engage in this sort of testing, making the mission particularly important.

Experts estimate that the annual global production of plastic, which was only 15 billion pounds in 1970, will by 2010 increase to 120 billion pounds. Because only three to five percent of plastics are recyclable, essentially all the plastic that has ever been created is still somewhere on our planet.

So are our oceans turning into what Moore calls “plastic soup?”

He and the Long Beach, Calif.-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation he established have found that the entire ocean has been affected, though the extent of the problem is still to be determined.

In our special interactive feature, follow the ship’s voyage to the Pacific Gyre through Capt. Moore’s log, with photographs every step of the way.