Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn Read Free Book Online Page B

globe.
    Others would drift into the gyre’s becalmed heart where the prevailing atmospheric high has created what Ebbesmeyer christened “the Garbage Patch”—a purgatorial eddy in the waste stream that covers, Ebbesmeyer told me, as much of the earth’s surface as Texas. When he is being fastidious, Ebbesmeyer will point out that there are in fact many garbage patches in the world, the one in the North Pacific being simply the largest, so far as we know. For that reason he sometimes refers to it as the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. Other times, in Beachcombers’ Alert! and elsewhere, he’ll distinguish between an Eastern Garbage Patch lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and California, and a Western Garbage Patch, lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and Japan. In fact, both patches are part of what most oceanographers call the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone—a bland term of art made blander still by its initials, STCZ. The scientific community’s love for acronyms and abbreviations, rivaled only by that of government bureaucrats, helps explain why Ebbesmeyer has enjoyed much more celebrity in the popular press than he has influence in the scientific community. He possesses a showman’s gift for folky coinages, but also, perhaps, a showman’s tendency to sensationalize. “It’s like Jupiter’s red spot,” he said. “It’s one of the great features of the planet Earth but you can’t see it.”
    He’d never visited the Garbage Patch himself, but he had received eyewitness reports from sailors. “They’d be sailing through there with their motors on—not sailing, motors on,” he said. “No wind, glassy calm water, and they start spotting refrigerators and tires, and glass balls as far as you could see.”
    Anecdotal evidence suggested that similar atmospheric highs had created garbage patches in the five other subtropical gyres churning the world’s oceans—including the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, which circumscribes the Sargasso Sea, so named because of the free-floating wilderness of sargasso seaweed that the currents have accumulated there. Later, skimming through Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea , in a chapter about the Sargasso Sea, I’d come upon a helpful explanation for patches of garbage like the one at the heart of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. “The only explanation which can be given,” Captain Nemo says of the seaweed engulfing the Nautilus , “seems to me to result from the experience known to all the world. Place in a vase some fragments of cork or other floating body, and give to the water in the vase a circular movement, the scattered fragments will unite in a group in the centre of the liquid surface, that is to say, in the part least agitated. In the phenomenon we are considering, the Atlantic is the vase, the Gulf Stream the circular current, and the Sargasso Sea the central point at which the floating bodies unite.” Nemo’s explanation is mostly accurate, with this one correction: the circular current is the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, of which the Gulf Stream describes only the north-by-northwesterly arc. A Sargasso of the Imagination, I thought as I listened to Ebbesmeyer describe the Garbage Patch. The phrase comes from a scene in The Day of the Locust, in which Nathanael West is describing a Hollywood backlot jumbled with miscellaneous properties and disassembled stage sets. 2
    There is no wilderness of seaweed at the center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which circles around the deepest waters on the planet, which are therefore among the least fertile. It is a kind of marine desert. If you went fishing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, all you’d likely catch aside from garbage is plankton, a class of creatures that includes both flora (phytoplankton, tiny floating plants that photosynthesize