고등학교 영어Ⅱ (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

In 1997, Charles Moore, a sailor from Long Beach, California, was sailing his boat home from Hawaii after taking part in a yacht race. His course took him through a calm, remote region of the North Pacific, far from the usual sailing routes. Having spent about a week crossing that quiet water, Moore later said that he had seen plastic floating on its surface every single day. Today the area is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a name that leads many people to picture a solid island of trash.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), however, that picture is misleading. The patch lies between Hawaii and California, where a rotating system of ocean currents, called a gyre, draws floating debris toward its center. Instead of piling up into solid ground, the debris is scattered across the surface and down through the water to the ocean floor. By count, most of it consists of microplastics, which are bits of plastic smaller than five millimeters and hard to notice with the naked eye. NOAA compares the scene to pepper swirling in soup rather than to a layer that could be skimmed off. In fact, a boat can sail through some parts of the patch without anyone on board spotting a single piece of trash.

Scientists who take on the task of measuring the patch face a basic problem: currents and winds keep the debris moving. Having gathered samples with eighteen ships and photographed the sea from an airplane, a research team published new findings in 2018. The team estimated that at least 79,000 metric tons of plastic were floating across a vast area of about 1.6 million square kilometers. That figure was four to sixteen times higher than earlier estimates, largely because the team measured large objects more carefully.

Microplastics made up 94 percent of the roughly 1.8 trillion pieces but only about 8 percent of the weight. Objects larger than five centimeters, such as abandoned fishing nets, accounted for more than 75 percent of it.

One response is the idea of cleaning up the patch itself, and large items such as nets can indeed be hauled out of the sea. Removing them, however, would leave behind almost all of the pieces, which wind and waves keep mixing through the water. NOAA therefore stresses the idea of keeping plastic out of the ocean before it ever gets there. Littering, poor waste management, and rainwater running off city streets all send plastic toward the sea. Having learned this, we can see the patch less as a distant island than as the far end of habits on land.