Speaking: a new contient

Last Friday, when I finished my oral work, our teacher Antonia asked me to publish it in this blog, but I had a lot of things to do and I forgot completely about it. Well, here it is, at last.

A new continent

Have you heard there is a new continent in our planet? Yeah, really! We humans created it. I created it, you created it, she created it, we all seven hundred thousand humans created it.

What do you think it's like? Does it have beaches, mountains, lakes, forests, valleys, rivers or desserts? No, it hasn't; it isn't like a normal continent. In fact, it's made of trash.

This new continent was discovered by Charles Moore in 1997.


It is located in the North Pacific Ocean, and it receives several names: Trash soup, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Pacific Trash Vortex and others.


 

This picture shows the evolution of the continent during the years:

It has an extension of three point five million square kilometres, the equivalent to seven Spains put all together. It weights three point five million tonnes.


It's made of all kinds of residues you can imagine: millions of plastics, wood, toys, nets, hooks, toothbrushes, industrial products, pens... All the junk that we humans trow to the beach, the sea or even the floor (more of the 80% of the garbage comes from land), the wind and the currents carry it to this continent, or make it gather with other junk, forming islands and islands of this kind.

The impact of all these islands is, obviously, negative in all ways: it contaminates the water we use, the fish we eat, the coastlines of the islands or countries near them...





This is Hawaii. It's located only one thousand kilometres away from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The waves are carrying garbage that accumulates in its coastline, and it's a very sad thing to see.

 

There are people who try to make a miserable profit of all this trash. The job of the boys you can see in these pictures is to search the surface of the sea to find plastics that can be recycled or used again. It's a very hard work, because they have to be bended on a boat or stand in the dirty water an extremely long time to find very few plastics. And their salary is very, very small.

And this isn't only bad for us – it's also harmful for animals.


Seagulls, for example, take land in this continent and start eating the garbage, not knowing it's dangerous for them and dying because they ate plastics, or hooks, or whatever. (This is the inside of a dead bird, full of plastics, as you can see. It's a bit disgusting, but it shows you pretty well what's the problem about.)

Fish also swallow the little pieces of plastic floating in the surface, as well as turtles, dolphins, jellyfish, seals and so many others.

 

 

Also, as I said before, the garbage contaminates the water in which animals and plants live, and that makes them fall ill and die.


There are also many other problems, like this you can see in the picture. That's what happens when a small turtle finds plastic rings on its way.

Remove all this toxic garbage would require advanced technology, boats and a specialised crew, and that costs a lot of money. Julio Barea, from Greenpeace association, says: “The garbage is located in international waters, so no one wants to take responsibility of it. We must develop measures to prevent new artificial continents (a good one could be recycling) and assume that no one will ever clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.

"Don't speak, don't see, don't hear"