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

Nick raced back and forth in the dinghy, in full Ocean Conservancy mode, fishing out buckets and detergent bottles and jugs, laundry baskets and the odd hard hat. He filled out reports for the International Coastal Cleanup, typed the debris log into his laptop, and climbed up to the maintop to watch for large objects and current lines. It was infectious. You might feel suddenly alert and purposeful: Nick had entered the room.

The day’s best catch was a large ghost net. George and the captain and I hauled it up the side, an ungodly tangle of net and rope and mesh, maybe three feet in diameter, that must have weighed at least 150 pounds. As it plopped on the deck, dozens of tiny crabs spilled from its recesses, flakes of cobalt blue that scuttled along the planking. They were the color of the Pacific. We threw them back. For all I know, such crabs only survive in the central Pacific if they have the animal of a ghost net to live in; and we, the destroyers, had pulled their host out of the water and consigned the survivors to certain doom in the crushing depths. We paid it no mind. In the future, ghost nets may be protected, just as whales and manatees are. But for now, it’s open season.

I crouched by the ghost to inspect it. What did it look like? A brain? A jellyfish? A great mound of intestines? Ropes of every color and weave and composition and thickness knotted and twisted into one another. Several bright plastic lozenges—floats, or markers—lurked in the jumble, marked with Chinese or Japanese characters. Some of the knots in the ghost’s component nets had clearly been tied by human hands, but others had to be the work of the ocean, tangled flights of topological insanity that bound one piece of junked rope or netting to the next.

Mary was watching. “I do hope we’ll be able to show you something better than that,” she said. She seemed to have little patience for the ghost nets, which were plastic-poor. It was plastic that she wanted, the current lines above all.

The current lines had become the Great White Ball of Trash prophesied by Art. Mary was confident that these strings of concentrated garbage, thrown together by the inner workings of the Gyre, were out here. The previous year’s voyage had encountered them, she told us, and she was sure we could find one now.

I was getting tired of hearing about them. We were in the Garbage Patch—shouldn’t we just be interested in what it was like? Instead, there was the sense that Project Kaisei only wanted the stuff. We needed something to show for our efforts. I wondered if this was symptomatic of a nonprofit bent on impressing its public or its funders. Would they be disappointed if we returned without a towering pile of trophy refuse? So we wanted more plastic, more dramatic densities, concentrations that we could really sink our teeth into. It was a more sophisticated way of believing in the plastic island, that idea that drove us all batty with annoyance. And I felt it kept us from appreciating the Garbage Patch as it was: just as vast and as problematic as we had expected, but deeply unspectacular. It required more than your eyes to grasp it. You had to think.

In this, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a cautionary tale in environmental aesthetics. We seem to require imagery to go with our environmental problems. If we don’t have an image to be horrified by, we can’t approach the problem in our minds. But sometimes the imagery distorts our thinking, or becomes a substitute for approaching the problem in the first place. And when there simply is no adequate image, we substitute others, creating islands where none exist.

No island, no carpet of plastic—yet we had without question entered the Garbage Patch. We had sailed a thousand empty miles into nowhere, finally reaching this place. And what did we find here, so removed from humanity? Far more trash than you see in San Francisco Bay. More than you see in your own back alley. Every minute on the water, every thirty seconds, a bottle, a bucket, a piece of tarp, a sprinkle of confetti, multiplied by the countless square mileage of the Gyre. And yet if you looked across the surface of the ocean, it was unremarkable. Would-be debunkers need not resort to pointing out, as they do, that you can’t find an image of the Garbage Patch on Google Earth. They should point out that you can’t find images of the Garbage Patch anywhere.

This is because it isn’t a visual problem, and this conflict between the reality of the problem and its nonvisual nature is at the root of the plastic island misconception. A metaphor is needed, a compelling image to suggest the scale and mass of the problem.

So let us explode the plastic island once and for all, and call it a galaxy. The Garbage Patch is like the Milky Way, an impossibly massive spiral that, because of its very vastness, is also phenomenally diffuse. Most of our galaxy is empty space. You could pass right through it without ever bumping into a star or a planet. The most massive object in the universe visible to the naked eye is made mostly of nothing.

If you were trying to figure out what a galaxy was, you would be plenty interested in the empty space between the stars, in whether or not it was truly empty, and in how the distribution of stars changed as you passed through the spiral arms. Like this, you might start to get an idea of your galaxy’s shape, structure, and size. (Note: Your galaxy is many times the size of Texas.)

Similarly, if we had been dragging sample nets and taking real data, a stretch of empty Gyre water would have been just as interesting to us as one decorated with plastic, not least because access to the Garbage Patch is so difficult. In all of history, how many research missions had been to the Eastern Garbage Patch to study marine plastic? The folks at Algalita tell me it’s about a dozen. The pool of existing data is therefore so small, and the character and dynamics of the Garbage Patch so poorly understood, that it felt negligent merely to obsess about finding the highest concentrations. But that is what we were doing. And if we were here to test cleanup methods, well, shouldn’t those methods apply even in more diffuse areas? We were missing an opportunity to help inch the science forward.

And the science needed inching. A few hours on bow watch were enough to leave any thoughtful deckhand bursting with questions. Where were the plastic bags, for instance? On land, the Garbage Patch was often linked with plastic shopping bags. But here we saw no plastic bags. Were they below the surface? Had they broken up into small fragments? Were they all in the Western Garbage Patch, toward Japan? Or was it simply a myth that plastic bags make it out to the Gyre?

What about the stuff we were seeing? Where was it from? For most objects, it seemed impossible to tell. But there were more items with Chinese or Japanese words on them than with English, and a few with Russian, too. Anecdotally, this reinforced the idea that the Eastern Garbage Patch might be composed disproportionately of refuse from the western rim of the Pacific. Perhaps the Western Garbage Patch, the evil twin of the one we had now entered, was home base to material from the coast of the United States and Canada. If only we could have sailed another three thousand miles, I might have found all those Capri Sun pouches I went through in sixth grade.

It was also difficult to make even casual judgments about whether the trash we were seeing had come from land or from sea-borne sources. The common wisdom is that three-quarters of ocean plastic comes from consumer sources on land. This is borne out in places like Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach, which catches the southwest edge of the Garbage Patch, and where lighters and toothbrushes and combs dominate. But for much of what we saw on the Kaisei, provenance was hard to determine.

And what factors determined what we could see? How, for instance, did an object’s density and shape affect whether it stayed on the surface and how it traveled through the Gyre? And how old were the objects we saw? And how toxic? And what proportion was large objects versus confetti? And was there a class of sub-confetti particles, an as-yet-unknown kingdom of microscopic polyethylene flora? And most important, what kind of change did this wreak on the ecosystem?

Little of this is yet known to science—and to my nerd mind, it was the chance to help answer even one of those questions that should have been our white whale. It was a whale that swam alongside us for the entire voyage, but that we never noticed. And so the Kaisei sailed the ocean blue, irony on the wind, a mission to raise awareness, but not knowledge.

The Pirate King was a licensed ham-radio operator. Of course he was. He could have built a ham radio from an old soda can and a box of matches, underwater, while strangling MacGyver with his feet. In his circumnavigation of the globe, he had built up a network of land-based radio contacts, colleagues whom he had never met. Through them, he said, he could get a radio transmission patched into the phone system. We could call home.

I wanted to tell the Doctor I was still alive, and when we would return to land. But nobody knew. Although we were supposed to arrive in time for San Diego’s tall-ship festival, Mary had been making indistinct noises about staying out as long as it took to find areas of higher trash-density. (Art’s jokes about Captain Ahab were seeming less joke-like by the day.) The Pirate King, for his part, was bent on heading back. I couldn’t tell if he was impatient with Mary, or tired of what he thought was a wild goose chase, or if perhaps he had a deep personal need to attend