The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now so large that dozens of species call it ‘home’

By Eric Ralls – earth.com

When we picture the open Pacific, we imagine endless blue water and not much else. Marine researchers, however, are now seeing something very different: places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where plastic waste has built a kind of artificial shoreline far from any land.

In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the huge rotating current system between California and Hawaii, floating objects tend to get trapped instead of drifting away.