Month: April 2004

Lying in between Japan, North America, and Hawaii, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is at the center of the large circulatory currents in the northern Pacific Ocean. There’s not much wind there and little current so few sailors cross it. One who did discovered a floating patch of garbage that not just dwarfs most civic landfills, but is truly planetary in size.

I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

A couple of the regulars from WFMU’s “Off The Hook” show went to the CeBit conference in Germany and reported back some interesting information with respect to biometric and RFID chips. Specifically, one company is currently in negotiations with the US government to provide RFID chips for inclusion in US passports beginning next year. (story begins 24min 30sec into the March 24 show)

Background information on RFID-implanted passports from EFF and Privacy International. Meanwhile, beginning in October the US will be requiring RFID or biometric-encoded passports from visitors entering the country and the EU is complying.