Tag Archives: professor

I’ve mentioned before on my blog about the giant mound of trash twice the size of Texas floating around in the Pacific Ocean, but only as part of another blog. Since National Geographic wrote about it today, along with some of the first documentation of the phenomenon, I thought I’d bring it up again. Here is a link to the National Geographic article. Here is a better picture of it. The floating plastic trash creates a hazard for aquatic life and consumers of aquatic life in the area, and represents 10% of the total worldwide plastic thrown away each year. No one knows how deep the marine dump is. The Scripps company is funding the effort to document to floating island of garbage. For those of you unfamiliar with Scripps, they own HGTV, several magazine holdings, and a news station and news paper in almost every state. They own a station in Tulsa and a paper in Muskogee here in Oklahoma. I am interested to see where this project leads in the future. If you assume we can ever even stop the annual input of plastic to this contribution, you still have the problem of what are we going to do with what is already there? Will we tie it together and create new land masses? The cities of the future? Or will we put it in a rocket ship and blast it off into the sun. I would love to be a part of this project, but barring that, I am excited to at least see someone researching it finally. Continue reading →