When Rich Horner, an avid scuba diver who lives in Indonesia, went diving off Lembongan in early March, he knew he’d see a bit of plastic trash here and there. It is Indonesia, after all, and the plastic pollution problem there is well-documented. What he didn’t expect to see was a swath of floating trash quite so… thick.
“The ocean currents brought us in a lovely gift of a slick of jellyfish, plankton, leaves, branches, fronds, sticks, etc,” he wrote. “Oh, and some plastic. Some plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic sheets, plastic buckets, plastic sachets, plastic straws, plastic baskets, plastic bags, more plastic bags, plastic, plastic, so much plastic!”
Plastic is not, by any means, a rare sight to see when diving, especially in Indonesia. It all comes from a variety of sources—the prevailing ocean currents and the outflow of rivers, for the most part. Rafts of debris consisting of branches, leaves, and sticks are very common. “The organic matter, the palm fronds, coconuts, branches, leaves, sticks, roots, tree trunks, etc, also of course seaweeds like the Sargassum seaweed [are] completely natural, and have been washed out of the rivers since forever,” Horner went on to explain. “But the plastic mixed in with it is not!”
In early March, a study of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch found it was far larger than previously thought. Now, it’s estimated to be around 617,763 square miles. It was back in the ’80s that researchers first noticed the floating accumulation of our trash. It’s not what you might think, though—while many visualize it as an actual island of floating garbage, it’s a little more complicated. It consists of all sorts of detritus including tiny pieces of plastic known as microplastics all the way up to fishing nets Much of it floats beneath the surface, making the actual size very difficult to gauge. Because of global currents, the trash Horner swam through will eventually become part of those patches.
By the next day, the massive raft of garbage Horner encountered had dispersed, broken up by the ocean’s currents. But although out-of-sight can easily mean out-of-mind, all that plastic isn’t going anywhere. “Sadly, the plastic is continuing on its journey, off into the Indian Ocean, to slowly break up into smaller and smaller pieces, into microplastics,” Horner said. “But not going away.”
As you can see in the video, there are fish and jellyfish swimming throughout the trash. They’re used to using the rafts of organic debris as cover and a food source, so they’re naturally attracted to these swirling masses of garbage.
Unfortunately, as those pieces of plastic break down into smaller bits, they become more and more tempting for sea life to eat. Coated in algae and bite-sized, they’re often mistaken for food by turtles, fish, and rays—basically any creature that eats food. “These small/tiny pieces of plastic will be eaten even more, entering the food chain, along with the toxins they contain and have absorbed,” Horner wrote. “That food chain, obviously leads up to us.”
