Aug 11 2009

Project Kaisei Enters the Gyre

Posted by: Jennifer Zerwer

It's been a week since the Project Kaisei Expedition team departed from the San Francisco Bay in two vessels to study marine debris in the North Pacific Gyre. Located in an area of the Pacific, north east of Hawaii, the North Pacific Gyre is part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic and other waste that's 30 meters deep and twice the size of Texas.

Project Kaisei's goal is to determine how to capture the waste and to study the potential to detoxify and recycle the materials into diesel fuel. Part of the research they are conducting includes trying a variety of devices to capture debris on a small-scale to help determine the best large-scale methods for waste capture. As Next100 has reported, Project Kaisei joins a small, but growing list of organizations that are seeking to address the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and slow the flow of waste into the oceans.

On Day 7, the Project Kaisei team has traveled 1,100 miles due west of Santa Monica and has begun to enter the Gyre. As they observe on their blog, the amount of plastic they are encountering is overwhelming:

"A week into our voyage, our planned mission transitioned into a shocking reality. When we began our trip, to the elusive vortex, we were not sure what we would find. We gather data from twice-daily trawls, plus thirty-minute observations from the bow and main mast, counting the number of pieces of debris sighted.

The second of today's trawls yielded a preponderance of plastic, versus marine life. The tally of plastic pieces counted in the thirty-minute observations today increased from 115 in the morning to well over 300 in the afternoon."

To follow the expedition in real-time, check out the Project Kaisei Interactive Voyage Tracker at: http://www.projectkaisei.org/.

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