On a sea of trash

On the first of June, two men and a rabbit set sail from the port of Long Beach, bound for Hawaii, on a raft made of junk. Their cabin is the cockpit of a Cessna 310, white with a blue racing stripe, salvaged from the desert. It floats on a system of handmade pontoons -- 15,000 plastic bottles held together with recycled nets -- propelled by currents and wind. If it sounds dangerous and makeshift, that's the point. The pilots of Junk, as the vessel is called, want to get your attention.

They are Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, and Joel Paschal, a former employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The rabbit was abandoned early on -- to a safe home, not the depths -- after proving a less than seaworthy companion.) Their cause is alerting the world to the fouling of our oceans by plastic debris, and Junk is the poster child ( www.junkraft.com).

Plastic flotsam -- 100 million tons of it -- already litters the oceans of the world. Another 60 billion tons of plastics will be produced this year alone. A particularly dense accumulation of debris can be found in a holding pattern 1,000 miles off the California coast, in an area known as the central North Pacific gyre, the calm core of a convergence of four major ocean currents rotating clockwise under a large high-pressure zone. What gets in there can be trapped for decades.

The buildup of plastics in the gyre is estimated to span 5 million square miles. That's the equivalent of the area of the United States -- all 50 states -- plus India. Some of the debris at the surface floats, some is "neutrally buoyant," suspended just below the waves, and some hovers even deeper. Some is apparent and recognizable -- water bottles, balloons, degraded buoys -- but over time, these objects break down into smaller and smaller plastic pieces until they become particulate, invisible to the naked eye. (And small enough to be ingested by fish and filter feeders, as the larger pieces are by birds and turtles.) Also, the central gyre is so vast that even a devastating quantity of visible debris will appear relatively diffuse. There's no observable "plastic island," no obvious "garbage patch."