Caption: JUNK Across the Pacific by Marcus Eriksen. A floating raft, made up of 15,000 plastic bottles and other debris.
This raft made an epic oceanic trek from California to Hawaii, in order to highlight the plight of the world’s oceans.
To the left are actual samples of plastic garbage taken from various gyres in mid-ocean.
Our planet has five major oceanic gyres, which are essentially massive circular vortices or ocean currents. Unfortunately piles of plastic tend to accumulate at the centre of these gyres, forming vast floating islands of garbage. But since they’re found miles from inhabited land, most people neither know nor care.
