Plastiki: First Landing

The Plastiki landed today on Christmas Island, completing the first major leg of its 11,000-mile sail from San Francisco to Sydney to explore the Pacific Garbage Patch and surrounding seas. The goal: to raise public awareness of the ocean's pollution from plastic and other man-made, non-degradable substances that are killing marine and bird life in rising numbers. The leader of the voyage, British banking heir David de Rothschild, is joined by five others, including Olav Heyerdahl, the grandson of Thor Heyerdahl, who achieved fame in 1947 when he sailed his balsa wood raft, The Kontiki, from Peru to French Polynesia to explain how the Polynesian islands came to be inhabited by South Americans.

Follow the journey on Twitter, @Plastiki, and check out the crew's blog updates.

Gyres from The Plastiki on Vimeo.

[Photograph: Christmas Island lagoon, courtesy The Plastiki]

Garbage Island

Don't miss Lindsay Hoshaw's spot.us piece in The New York Times on the expanding Pacific Garbage Patch -- what Hoshaw describes as a Texas-sized area of "light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice."

This floating stew exists in far away areas of the Pacific Ocean. But the problem it poses is not as remote as it may seem. Photographer Chris Jordan used this fall's PopTech conference in Maine to unveil his latest project, Midway: Message from the Gyre, a series of photographs that he shot in September on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral in the North Pacific.



The images are striking—of dead albatross chicks, decaying on the white sands of the atoll. Jordan's work documents consumerism and its aftermath; the Midway atoll series shows chicks that had been fed a diet of human trash from the garbage patch in the area's polluted ocean waters. The plastic that had killed the chicks remains intact.

Jordan says the chicks die young, either from the toxins in the plastic or from choking on the refuse that had been mistaken for food. "We have this enormous, frightening problem of plastic pollution in our oceans and scientists are just starting to understand the effect it is having in the marine and wildlife environments," Jordan told PopTech conferees. Jordan said that around the atoll, there are six times the amount of plastic than there are plankton.