Some might think the days of discovering new territory on Earth are long gone.However American Captain Charles Moore discovered an uncharted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean only a few years ago.Unfortunately his island wasn’t comprised of land, but trash. Estimated at twice the size of Texas, the area has since been dubbed The Pacific Garbage Patch.Capt Moore is to deliver a talk on his finding at a talk hosted by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences tomorrow night.“I grew up on Long Beach, California,” he told The Royal Gazette. “I could see the ocean from my house. I have been piloting boats since I was five years old and also swimming and diving and water skiing and surfing. I have spent so much of my life in the ocean I consider myself a marine mammal.”Over time, he began to notice more and more garbage in the water alongside him, and it bugged him.Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer first suggested there might be large gyres of trash swirling around in the ocean. Dr Ebbesmeyer is well known for his beachcombing work and has visited Bermuda. His expertise is in ocean currents.“He had a theory but I was the first one to see the garbage patch and analyse and write papers about it,” said Capt Moore. “We don’t know how wide it is. The data we have accumulated so far verifies Dr Ebbesmeyer’s rough estimate that it is twice the size of Texas.”Capt Moore is the author of ‘Plastic Ocean’ and also the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. The foundation’s focus is on the coastal ocean, specifically the restoration of disappearing giant kelp forests and the improvement of water quality through the preservation and reconstruction of wetlands along the California coast. Algalita is Spanish for kelp.Capt Moore’s research has suggested that in the surface waters of the central Pacific, plastic fragments outweigh zooplankton 6 to 1, while off Southern California the ratio is 2.5 to 1. As a result, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has estimated the amount of plastic pollution in the world’s ocean at nearly 100 million tons.Patches, or gyres, similar to the Pacific Garden Patch exist in all the oceans Bermuda sits on the edge of one in the North Atlantic. The gyres tend to exist in subtropical regions north and south of the equator and they run roughly along the same latitude as the world’s land-based deserts.“When we say there are areas of high concentration, we are talking about a million pieces of trash per square kilometre,” said Capt Moore. “They are small pieces. Where there is a 100,000 or 10,000 pieces per square kilometre, that is still part of this gyre.”For the most part the garbage in the centre of the trash gyre is unidentifiable. It is broken up into fragments and small bits. However, some of it has been traced back to either land-based trash or trash from fishing and aqua culture industries. There is low density of life under the gyres of trash, and these bits of refuse can be very dangerous to turtles, birds, fish and other marine life.“Because Bermuda is on the edge of the North Atlantic gyre, a lot of trash washes up on your beaches,” said Capt Moore. “There are folks at BIOS who sample it. In fact, one of their scientists said she was sorry she was going to miss my talk because she will be on a boat trawling for plastic.”Capt Moore will also network with other oceanographers and marine scientists on the Island while here. He also plans to go to the beach and carry out some basic examinations of the trash found there.“Unfortunately, what is in the deep ocean cannot be cleaned up,” he said. “The trash in the deep ocean is too dispersed. All we can do is stop putting trash in the ocean and look for ways to get trash out of rivers and off of shoreline.“We are going to have to start looking at our trash. When you are done with something, you are done with it, and it is out of sight, out of mind. We have to start seeing our trash again, and re-envisioning the reincarnation of our trash. An important task we face as a civilisation is envisioning the reincarnation of our resources instead of the disappearance.”His talk ‘How Plastics Pollution is Threatening the World’s Ocean’ takes place tomorrow at 6.30pm at XL House in Hamilton. Tickets, $20, are available from Vanessa Shorto: Vanessa.Shorto[AT]bios.edu or 297-1880 x204.Useful website: www.algalita.org.