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    Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the World's Oceans
    Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the World's Oceans
    Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the World's Oceans
    Ebook79 pages48 minutes

    Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the World's Oceans

    By Danielle Smith-Llera

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    About this ebook

    Millions of tons of plastic slip into oceans every year. Some floats and travels slowly with the currents, endangering the health of marine animals. The rest is hardly visible but is far more dangerous. Tiny bits of plastic sprinkle the ocean's surface or mix into the sandy seafloor and beaches. It ends up inside birds, fish, and other animals, harming them-and ultimately humans. Experts struggle with fear and hope as they work to stop the flood of plastic threatening living organisms across the globe.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapstone Young Readers
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9780756557577
    Trash Vortex: How Plastic Pollution Is Choking the World's Oceans
    Author

    Danielle Smith-Llera

    Danielle Smith-Llera grew up in coastal Virginia, hearing unforgettable tales about her Mexican and Irish ancestors. She first moved overseas to teach in international schools in Hungary and Brazil. Life in the U.S. Foreign Service has taken her around the world to live in India, Jamaica, Romania, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Washington, DC. She loves sharing stories—fiction, nonfiction, and a mixture of both—in classrooms, museum exhibits, and, of course, books.

    Read more from Danielle Smith Llera

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      Book preview

      Trash Vortex - Danielle Smith-Llera

      Cover

      Chapter One

      A SURPRISE AT SEA

      Captain Charles Moore felt the wind across the north Pacific Ocean die to a whisper. A few weeks earlier, it had filled the sails of the Alguita, pushing the white 50-foot-long (15-meter-long) sailboat west from California to Hawaii in the 1997 TransPacific Yacht Race. He carried a trophy for third place and was enjoying brisk winds pushing him and his crew back home to California — until now. Moore had scanned weather reports and turned the Alguita’s bow southeast. It had entered an expanse of ocean that was as still as a painting.

      Sailors usually try to avoid the north Pacific Ocean. The weather there is not too stormy or unpredictable, but too calm. Legends tell of desperate sailors waiting so long for wind that they had to conserve drinking water by drowning their cargo of livestock. Sailors and scientists now understand that this quiet expanse of ocean is the center of a gyre (pronounced JI-er), a whirlpool that is thousands of miles wide. Powerful currents flow around the outer edges, like rivers through the ocean. Driven by the wind and Earth’s rotation, the currents sweep west across the Pacific Ocean and up the coast of Asia. Then they move east across the ocean, down the west coast of North America, and west to begin the cycle again.

      Captain Charles Moore and his research sailboat, the Alguita

      The water encircled by the currents turns clockwise sluggishly. Moore’s modern sailboat was equipped with diesel engines, a system to make seawater drinkable, and a radio to call for help. Even so, a detour across these calm waters would haunt him. It would convince him that the ocean held a danger so great that it threatened the survival not only of his crew, but of organisms all over the globe.

      On August 8, while standing on deck, Moore saw something unexpected. Here and there, odd bits and flakes speckle the ocean’s surface,¹ he later wrote in the book Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans. He was disturbed because the objects were plastic. He said it looked as if a giant salt shaker has sprinkled bits of plastic onto the surface of the ocean.² Each day he scanned the water and found that No matter the time of day or how many times a day I look, it’s never more than a few minutes before I sight a plastic morsel bobbing by. A bottle here, a bottle cap there, scraps of plastic film, fragments of rope or fishing net, broken-down bits of former things.³ For seven days the Alguita traveled more than a thousand miles with Moore noticing that They were always there: plastic shards, fluttering like lost moths in the surface waters of the deep, remote ocean.⁴

      Moore returned to Alamitos Bay, California, where he had spent his youth swimming, surfing, and sailing in the Pacific Ocean. By the 1980s, he wrote, pollution of many kinds made residents think twice about eating a fish they caught off the pier.⁵ Now he wrote that he could not stop thinking about all those miles and days of plastic. Over the decades we’d gotten used to the sight of trash on the beach, by the roadsides, and in riverbeds, of shopping bags fluttering on fences and branches.… But something seemed very wrong about this plastic trash in the mid-Pacific.⁶ He wanted to know why it was there.

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