Charles J. Moore is an

oceanographer Oceanography (), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of top ...

and

boat A boat is a watercraft of a large range of types and sizes, but generally smaller than a ship, which is distinguished by its larger size or capacity, its shape, or its ability to carry boats. Small boats are typically used on inland waterways s ...

captain known for articles that recently brought attention to the '

Great Pacific Garbage Patch The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (also Pacific trash vortex and North Pacific Garbage Patch) is a garbage patch, a gyre of marine debris particles, in the central North Pacific Ocean. It is located roughly from 135°W to 155°W and 35°N ...

', an area of the Pacific Ocean strewn with floating plastic debris caught in a gyre.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In 1997, while returning to southern California after finishing the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii Transpacific sailing race, he and his crew caught sight of trash floating in the

North Pacific Gyre The North Pacific Gyre (NPG) or North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), located in the northern Pacific Ocean, is one of the five major oceanic gyres. This gyre covers most of the northern Pacific Ocean. It is the largest ecosystem on Earth, loca ...

, one of the most remote regions of the ocean. He wrote articles about the extent of this garbage, and the effects on sea life, which attracted significant attention in the media. “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore later wrote in an essay for Natural History, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” An oceanographic colleague of Moore's dubbed this floating junk yard “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” and despite Moore's efforts to suggest different metaphors — “a swirling sewer,” “a superhighway of trash” connecting two “trash cemeteries” — “Garbage Patch” appears to have stuck. His 1999 study showed that there was six times more plastic, by weight, in this part of the ocean than the

zooplankton Zooplankton are the heterotrophic component of the planktonic community (the " zoo-" prefix comes from ), having to consume other organisms to thrive. Plankton are aquatic organisms that are unable to swim effectively against currents. Consequent ...

that feeds ocean life. In 2002, a later study showed that even off the coast of California, plastic outweighed zooplankton by a factor of 5:2. These numbers were significantly higher than expected and shocked many oceanographers.

Algalita Marine Research and Education

Moore is the founder of the Algalita Marine Research and Education in

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a coastal city in southeastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is the list of United States cities by population, 44th-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 451,307 as of 2022. A charter ci ...

. In 2008 the Foundation co-sponsored the

JUNK Raft A junk raft is a type of home-built watercraft made of plastic bottles or other recycled materials constructed by artists and community-minded groups organizing recreational flotillas, or by environmentally concerned individuals seeking to draw at ...

project, to "creatively raise awareness about plastic debris and pollution in the ocean", and specifically the

trapped in the

, by sailing 2,600 miles across the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

on a raft made from an old

Cessna 310 The Cessna 310 is an American four-to-six-seat, low-wing, twin-engine monoplane produced by Cessna between 1954 and 1980. It was the second twin-engine aircraft that Cessna put into production; the first was the Cessna T-50. It was used by the ...

aircraft fuselage and six pontoons filled with 15,000 old plastic bottles. Crewed by Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the Foundation, and film-maker Joel Paschal, the raft set off from

on 1 June 2008, arriving in

Honolulu, Hawaii Honolulu ( ; ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, located in the Pacific Ocean. It is the county seat of the Consolidated city-county, consolidated City and County of Honol ...

on 28 August 2008. On the way, they gave valuable water supplies to Ocean rower

Roz Savage Rosalind Elizabeth Adriana Savage (born 23 December 1967), known as Roz Savage, is an English ocean rower, environmental advocate, writer, speaker and politician. She was elected as a Liberal Democrat MP for the new South Cotswolds constituen ...

, also on an environmental awareness voyage. The construction of the JUNK Raft began in April 2008 and was finished in May that year. The undertaking of constructing this seaworthy raft was aided by volunteers who cleaned bottles and fastened bottle caps, stuffing them into the recycled fisherman's net pontoon forms. Recently, the foundation sponsored an expedition to the Southern Hemisphere that involved Moore and his colleagues travelling to Easter Island to collect water samples for analysis of plastic content, then traveled to Valparaiso, Chile, to work with the Cientificos de la Basura program. The crew later collected water samples from different beaches along the Chilean coastline. During this expedition, Moore and his crew collected

plastic pollution Plastic pollution is the accumulation of plastic objects and particles (e.g. plastic bottles, bags and microbeads) in the Earth's environment that adversely affects humans, wildlife and their habitat. Plastics that act as pollutants are catego ...

samples across the Equatorial Currents, the

South Pacific Gyre The Southern Pacific Gyre is part of the Earth's system of rotating ocean currents, bounded by the Equator to the north, Australia to the west, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the south, and South America to the east. The center of the South ...

, and at various stations along the Chilean coast. Upon analyzing the plastic debris concentration data, Moore found increased plastic concentration in all the water samples he collected. However, according to the Algalita Foundation, more datasets are needed to support their hypothesis. In May 2020, he founded The Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research and serves as Research Director with over 20 years of experience in this field. The Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research focuses on research around micro- and nano-plastics in the environment Charles J. Moore research director will become articulate in identifying

microplastics Microplastics are "synthetic solid particles or polymeric matrices, with regular or irregular shape and with size ranging from 1 μm to 5 mm, of either primary or secondary manufacturing origin, which are insoluble in water." Microplastics a ...

as an area of concern in our oceans. (''Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research 2023'')

References

External links

Algalita Marine Research and Education

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLrVCI4N67M The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Good Morning America, on YouTube -- includes interview with Charles Moore: the plastic retrieved in samples has doubled in density from 2003 to 2008]
JUNK raft blog

The Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moore, Charles J. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American oceanographers American environmentalists American male sailors (sport) Rafting

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Algalita Marine Research and Education

See also

References

External links