Hoping
to learn more about one of the most glaring examples of waste and
environmental pollution on earth, a group of scientists will set sail
from San Francisco today to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive
vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be
twice the size of Texas.
The bobbing debris field, where currents
swirl everything from discarded fishing line to plastic bottles into
one soupy mess, is located about 1,000 miles west of California.
"This
is a problem that is kind of out of sight, out of mind, but it is
having devastating impacts on the ocean. I felt we needed to do
something about it," said Mary Crowley, co-founder of Project Kaisei, a
nonprofit expedition that is partnering on the voyage with the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
Crowley — a Sausalito
resident who owns a yacht chartering company, Ocean Voyages — has been
sailing the Pacific Oce
