After 25 days at sea, the New Horizon will be docking at the Scripps Institute in San Diego. It has spent all this time studying ways to clean up a floating quagmire of plastic twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean.This quagmire of plastic lies about 1,000 miles off the California coast. This region, known as the North Pacific Gyre, is the eventual destination of debris and trash dumped into the ocean. A plastic bottle discarded at a San Diego beach could spend as long as six years circling the Pacific before reaching the gyre.
Conducting a study like this costs $30,000.00 per day. The total cost of $1.1 million was paid for by a grant of $600,000.00 from the University of California's Ship Funds, and donations from various sources in the United States. The biggest single donation, however, came from the Belgium-based Bureau of International Recycling.
With any luck, the good people at Scripps will find a way to clean this mess up and get all this plastic junk out of our oceans.
Here is a good animation showing the area studied by Scripps.
