cold running crud

So the latest misconception I find one has to guard against is the belief that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the gyre where the plastic and other waste that's going in the ocean winds up, is an actual floating pile of garbage.

It's not. Here's an article about that.

The so-called patch isn’t so much an island as it is a soup, however, in which broken-down bits of plastic are like pepper flakes. Much of the waste is pea-sized or smaller and floats below the surface. That explains why, when you’re there, “it just looks like ocean,” said Melanie Bergmann, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who last visited the region in 2019. The same is true for a handful of other marine garbage patches, which form around gyres — systems of rotating currents.

According to NOAA, while there are some abandoned fishing nets and other macrotrash out there, there's no heaps of it and most of the time you won't see anything at all. By the time it gets out there, most of it has been broken down into tiny fragments. The curse of plastics is that, no matter how much you break it down, it doesn't go away, and that's why these patches - and ocean pollution generally, because the patches are really only a small part of it - are such a problem.

But if you see anyone claiming to have skimmed huge piles of plastic trash - of the kind you'd expect to see in your city garbage dump - from the middle of the ocean, it's a fake.