Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

but thick and black and green. I stared upward, at the space into which the Lucas Gusher had exploded. But I couldn’t quite see it. The more I tried to picture it, the more I felt its absence—an empty blue volume where oil had said its name.

The sun blinked. A hawk had crossed it. The shadow coasted away on the ruffled surface of the lake. It was Earth Day. Half a mile back, Steven Radley was sinking well after well into the miserly ground. In the Gulf, BP’s well was running and running. It would be months before anyone could stop it.

But not Radley’s well. He called me before I left town. The well was dry, he said. They were going to plug it and move on.

Four THE EIGHTH CONTINENT Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In my sleep, I heard the call. All hands. Someone had shouted it into our cabin. All hands to strike sail. We fell out of our bunks, struggled into our rain gear, and went above half-awake.

The deck was a starless uproar of wind and sound. “The Navy’s running an exercise nearby,” said the first mate. “They’ve ordered us to head north. I asked them to let us run downwind, but they just repeated the order.” The ship, under engine power, was running directly into the wind, the sails flapping powerless and wild. They would be torn to shreds.

We wrestled the foresails in the dark. The air filled with spray, with thick rope jerking and snapping in chaos. There were six of us in the bow. Four were out on the bowsprit—the long spar extending forward over the water— and two on the most forward part of the deck, where the bowsprit joined the ship.

I was on the deck, feeling with my hands in the dark, trying to find the downhaul lines and gaskets that would draw down and fasten the sails. After weeks at sea, I knew what I was looking for, but that didn’t mean I could find it.

The ship crested a large wave. We felt the bow rise higher and higher into the night. It seemed to pause at the top. For a moment we floated in the salty air.

Then we fell. The ship buried its prow in the oncoming wave, deeper than ever before. The four on the bowsprit—my friends—disappeared below the surface, foam churning over their heads. Were they clipped in? The deck went under with them. The water surged to my waist, tugging at me, sliding me aft. Robin grabbed my arm and I grabbed the rail, and we kept ourselves from tumbling backward down the deck. I looked at the bowsprit and thought, All I see is foam.

A second more and the ship came through, rising out of the swell, and I saw them. They were still there, still clutching the bowsprit, all four of them. I counted them again. Four. Had there been more?

“Is everybody there?” I shouted. “Is everyone still on board?”

But they were already working again, grappling the sails, water streaming from their jackets, shrieking like bull riders.

Robin let go and we returned to the tangle of lines at our feet. But my head was swimming with the afterimage of the water rising up to us, of the sea invading the deck. I still felt it, how it pulled at my body, an overwhelming force that swirled around and through us, the alien gravity of another universe, the black remorseless ocean.

You will have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an island of trash, formed by a giant vortex of currents that gathers all the eternal, floating plastic in the northern half of the Pacific Ocean into an endless, swirling purgatory, a self-assembling plastic continent twice the size of Texas.

Let’s nip this in the bud: It’s not an island.

I’d like to say that again. It’s not. An island.

There is no solid mass, no floating carpet of trash, no landfill. But it is real. It was first discovered in 1997 by the yachtsman and environmentalist Charles Moore, who made it the focus of his nonprofit, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It is thanks to Moore’s observations that the Pacific Garbage Patch entered the popular consciousness, sometime in the mid-2000s. As for who’s responsible for the irresistible image of a plastic island, I don’t know. But someone should run them down and give them a nice, quick smack. Furthermore, an exorbitant fine should be levied on anyone—anyone—who describes this non-island as being “the size of Texas” or “twice the size of Texas.” When I was doing my preliminary research, it seemed impossible to find a piece of media about the garbage patch that didn’t mention Texas.

Why Texas? Is there no other territory that could serve as a reader-friendly reference point? Has hack journalism become so impoverished an art form that its practitioners can’t even be troubled with the five googling seconds it would take to craft an entirely original gem like “three times the size of California,” or “two Nevadas and an Arizona,” or “nearly as big as Alaska, if you leave out the Aleutians”?

The real problem is that, although two Texases clear a trim half-million square miles, nobody knows how large the Garbage Patch actually is. Unlike Texas and, critically, unlike an island, it has no defined boundary, only a general area. So let’s just call it big, and be done with it.

A more appropriate analogy would be that of an ecosystem. System is the key here, implying something much more complex than a simple floating object. From tuna-size hunks of Styrofoam and discarded fishing nets that lurk like massive jellyfish, down to microscopic pellets that hang in the water like artificial plankton, it is a vast, plastic simulacrum of the living ocean that is its host. And precisely because it is so complex, and so far from land, its nature is poorly understood.

Nobody can say for sure exactly where all the stuff comes from, but there is broad agreement that its sources are disproportionately land-based. A surprising amount of trash manages to avoid the landfill, and when it does, it often makes its way to the sea, whether by way of storm drains, rivers, or other avenues.

Since plastic objects don’t degrade easily, if ever, they have plenty of time to work their way out from land and find the ocean’s currents. A plastic bottle taken by the currents off San Francisco will travel south as it heads out into the Pacific, passing through the latitudes of Mexico and even Guatemala before heading west in earnest, caught by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This vast counterclockwise vortex will take the bottle clear across to the Philippines before shooting it north toward Taiwan, close by Japan, and then spitting it back past Alaska, toward the rest of North America.

Around and around the Gyre goes, and the plastic bottles and hard hats of the North Pacific go with it, we assume, until at last they drift into the becalmed zones spinning at the eastern and western ends of this oceanic conveyor belt. These are the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches. (The Eastern gets all the attention because it’s closer to the United States and was the first to be discovered.) Here, our plastic bottle finds its friends: all the other bits and pieces of plastic that have made it into the ocean in the previous who-knows-how-long. And here they wait, year upon year, breaking into fragments from the action of the waves, and strangling hapless turtles, choking overzealous albatross that mistake plastic for food, and being eaten by fish.

Eventually, the scientists and the activists and the adventurers come. Whatever part of our plastic history that floats, the Garbage Patch is the place for them to find it: our bottles, our plastic tarps, our popped bubble wrap, the tiny plastic “scrubbing beads” of our exfoliating face soap. It’s all here for the hunting.

Or so I hoped. But without a single cruise line running through, how was I to know for sure? Which brings us to another interesting thing about the Garbage Patch: hardly anyone has actually seen it. It takes serious oceangoing chops to get out there. And there’s almost no reason anyone with a boat would bother. Most people with yachts and things are more interested in going to places like Hawaii, or the Bahamas, or anywhere. But the Garbage Patch, inherent to its formation, is in the middle of the biggest nowhere on the planet.