Lecture to paint picture of the Pacific’s giant mass of garbage

Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

For those not in the know, it’s a mass of trash and other assorted debris almost twice the size of Texas and extending to depths of 100 feet and beyond. It floats within something called the North Pacific Gyre, the center of a multitude of converging currents that are thousands of miles wide. This convergence creates a vortex, which effectively traps whatever waste items enter its realm until they either disintegrate or find their way out of the circulating waters and onto a shore.

Explorit will present a free public lecture about the Patch at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (Feb. 3) at the Davis Musical Theatre Company, 607 Peña in Davis. The speaker will be Eben Schwartz, outreach manager for the California Coastal Commission. He has titled the lecture “Your Neighborhood’s Secret Dump: The Pacific’s Floating Garbage Patch,” and it's part of Explort's 18th annual Cutting Edge Lecture Series.

The Patch is about 1,000 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands and 1,000 miles west of California. It can be seen either as an endless source of fascination as it is providing a wealth of scientific data on the effects of waste on the marine ecosystem or as a horrifying abomination for the very same reasons.

At this time, the Patch is still not understood very well, and new data-collecting tests are being performed on it all the time. Its overall effects on the marine ecosystem are largely unknown (and understandably worrying). Many perceive it as a solid mass, but it is really more of a soupy substance primarily composed of plastics. Plastics, over all other debris that wanders into the Patch, are the dominant items due to their resistance to biodegradation and their typical buoyancy. Moreover, they are also some of the deadliest items given their nature to absorb pollutants, such as the pesticide DDT, which potentially make their way into the food chain should a marine animal ingest such a saturated plastic.

So, how exactly does a piece of trash we throw away make its way to such a scary place? Answer: far easier than you might think. Perhaps you’re having a picnic on the beach and you are picking up all your trash when, suddenly, a gust of wind plucks a plastic spork – one of those little spoon-fork combos – from your hand and off it goes out into the water. Borne upon a number of current systems, the spork will, most likely, after the passage of many years, make its way into the Patch.

Schwartz will describe what happens to it from that point on in his lecture. The subject of ocean debris is of personal interest to him. He began volunteering for the commission’s California’s Coastal Clean-Up Day in 1996. In 2000, he joined the commission in an official capacity. One of his ongoing goals is “to educate the public about the impacts of marine debris on our coast and oceans.”

Schwartz will use a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate his lecture about the Patch itself, its origins and potential solutions.

When asked what we might be able to do to quell the ever-increasing mass of the Patch, Schwartz stated that the “people in Davis and across the world have to recognize that the growth of the Garbage Patch is fueled by the world’s appetites.” In other words, if we, as consumers, continue to demand plastic items of the single-use variety (eg. sporks), the more such items will be created and the greater the increase in the potential of such items to eventually end up in the Patch.

Solution? Re-use and recycle.

As a precursor to Schwartz’ lecture, listen to him being interviewed by Jeffrey Callison on Capital Public Radio’s “Insight” program on Tuesday afternoon. It airs from 2-3 p.m. on KXJZ (90.9 FM).
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Explorit Science Center has two exhibitions running: “Body Blueprints” and “Move It! Science in Action.” Admission is $4 general, free for age 3 and under. The museum is open from 2-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Explorit is at 2801 Second Street, Davis. For more information: (530) 756-0191 or www.explorit.org