"Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human–and planetary–health. The gyre was more like a desert–a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it. So did the ocean's top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. "The doldrums," sailors called it, and they steered clear. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita's course, veering slightly north. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea. It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny.
Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life's purpose in a nightmare.
0 kommentar(er)
