All plastic debris, well, anything that floats and falls into the Pacific Ocean, ultimately finds its way to the Gyre Current in the Northern Pacific. This current, which runs counter clockwise, acts as a collecting point for such debris. 3,000 pairs of Nikes from South Korea that fell out of a container ship? Yep. climb_ca's yearly supply of blow-up mistresses from Guangzhou that mysteriously disappeared? You got it. 6m Coke bottles ... bleh, you get the point.

Unlike many discarded materials, most plastics in common use do not biodegrade. Instead they "photodegrade," a process whereby sunlight breaks them into progressively smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers. In fact, the degradation eventually yields individual molecules of plastic, but these are still too tough for most anything—even such indiscriminate consumers as bacteria—to digest. And for the past fifty years or so, plastics that have made their way into the Pacific Ocean have been fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

It surprised me that the debris problem in the gyre had not already been looked at more closely by the scientific community. In fact, only recently starting in the early 1990s—has the scientific community begun to focus attention on the trash in the gyre. One of the first investigators to study the problem was W James Ingraham Jr., an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle. Ingraham's Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) predicts that objects reaching this area might revolve around in it for sixteen years or more [below].

Interesting. So you have millions upon millions of little bits of plastic swirling around in the ocean. Nice, I guess the Texas reference is apropos (and notice the pic of the most famous of Texans), since like plastic, and as the joke goes - farts, Texans never go back to where they came from. Zing!