On my desk I have a small, clear jar labeled, "Pacific Ocean sample in seawater." Filled with a confetti of plastic debris and swirling plankton, the jar looks like one of those toy snow globes. Instead of a picturesque winter scene, this glass jar offers an unsettling vision of the future, showing just how polluted our oceans are becoming with plastic debris.
Eco-adventurers Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins sent me the ocean sample as part of their Message in a Bottle campaign. Staring at this sample of seawater, I am transported to the so-called "Garbage Patch" in the middle of the North Pacific Gyre, where they collected it. The Garbage Patch is often misunderstood to be a floating body of trash that has been described as being once, twice and even three times the size of Texas. But it's more like a "plastic soup" within the eye of the Gyre, a continent-sized body of swirling water that concentrates the world's trash into a toxic brew of marine debris between Japan and California.
Captain Charlie Moore discovered the Garbage Patch in 1997 on his way back from a Trans-Pac Race from California to Hawai'i. Taking a more northerly route home through the doldrums, Moore first steered his sleek catamaran and research vessel, the Alguita, through the North Pacific Gyre and was dumbfounded to see floating plastic garbage everywhere he looked. Upon arriving back on the mainland, he recruited a crew of researchers and embarked on regular voyages through the Gyre to assess just how much plastic marine debris existed in the area. Though they didn't know each other at the time, Marcus and Anna eventually joined the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF) and signed on to sail on Moore's next voyage to the Pacific Gyre in 2008.
Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins first met at Charlie Moore's 60th birthday party in 2007, and they immediately hit it off. Marcus, a former Marine who fought in the first Gulf War, later received a Ph.D. in science education and became an environmental and peace activist in Los Angeles, Calif. during the Iraq War. Anna, also an environmental activist, founded Save Our Shores in Santa Cruz, Calif. and then discovered the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. Marcus had just been hired as the Director of Educational Research and he recruited her to join the team and sail on their first voyage to the Gyre.
In 2008, Marcus, Anna and a Hawai'i sailor named Joel Paschal sailed to the North Pacific Gyre with Captain Moore. During their 4000-mile voyage through the Gyre in early 2008, they drug a manta trawl behind the boat and fished for plastic debris. Along with all kinds of land-based debris, from bags to bottles to cigarette lighters, they found fish full of plastic as well. After dissecting their catch, they counted 84 pieces of plastic in one 2.5-inch long fish.
"At that point, there were 156 species known to ingest plastic in the Pacific Gyre," said Paschal. Because plastics never biodegrade and only photo-degrade into smaller pieces, all kinds of sea life eat these micro-plastics.
"Plastic particles are sponges for pollutants and transmit them up the food chain back to us," said Captain Moore. "This will devastate the base of the food webÜjust as over-fishing devastates the top of the food web."
Under the watchful eye of Captain Moore, the pair continued conducting research and collecting samples of plastic debris. Marcus was secretly working on a ring made of metal debris and making big plans for the future. Then, on Valentine°s Day, Marcus proposed to Anna on a quiet night under a diamond-studded sky. She accepted, surrounded by a sea full of plastic confetti. For the rest of the voyage, they began planning out their next eco-adventures, and that's when the Message in a Bottle project was conceived.
As part of their campaign, their mission was to educate people about the alarming rise of plastic marine debris, which is denser in some areas than plankton, the most basic source of food in the ocean. Marcus and Anna chose to share this serious message in a most engaging, fun and informative wayÜby creating "eco-adventures" that wove their research into their own personal journeys. Their cause became inseparable from how they defined themselves and their bond, an improbable love story borne on a sea of debris.
For the first phase of the project, Marcus, Anna and Joel decided to build a raft made out of plastic bottles and sail it from California to Hawai'i to increase awareness of plastic marine debris. "Marcus had already floated down the Mississippi on a bottle boat," said Paschal, "and he became like Noah at that point, appointed by God to build a boat out of bottles." He was going to call it Plastiki, after Thor Hyerdahl's famous raft Kon Tiki. But at the same time, another eco-adventurer named David de Rothschild, the heir to the banking dynasty, had also come up with a remarkably similar idea in San Francisco, Calif. He was planning to sail across the Pacific on a high-tech boat made of plastic that he also wanted to call Plastiki. The ex-Marine and the wealthy scion argued about who came up with the idea first, but eventually Marcus gave him the use of the name and moved on with his own project.
Shifting gears, Marcus and Joel constructed their make-shift raft out of discarded junk: hulls made of 15,000 plastic bottles and held together by fishing nets; a deck consisting of old sailboat masts lashed together; a cabin made from the body of a wingless Cessna airplane. They fittingly dubbed the motley raft the Junk and set sail from Long Beach in early June of 2008 like a modern Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It was a dangerous voyage and many believed they wouldn't make it. Although Anna was not sailing with Marcus and Joel, she had helped build the raft and was anxiously monitoring their daily progress across the Pacific.
During their 88-day journey, Marcus and Joel sailed through the North Pacific Gyre and described this swirling vortex as a "toilet bowl that never flushes." Before embarking on the voyage, Marcus had spoken on the phone with a British woman named Roz Savage, who had already rowed across the Atlantic several years before and hoped to become the first woman to row across the Pacific. They had planned to coordinate their efforts, but Roz had left San Francisco on her rowing voyage before they could connect again.
More than two months into their journeys, the eco-mariners learned that they were within 100 miles of each other. "My mom was reading Roz's blog and heard that her water maker was broken," Paschal said. They were eventually able to make contact with her on the VHF radio and find her on radar. They eventually caught up with each other, a miraculous encounter at sea because both parties were running dangerously low on supplies.
"Fortunately, when I met up with the guys on the Junk in mid-ocean, we were able to do a trade," Savage said. She had plenty of food and no water, and they had lots of water but very little food. After eating a fine dinner of freshly speared mahimahi, she added, "We cut through all the small talk and got down to discussing the environment and how we could collaborate." After three hours of talking, Savage literally rowed away into the sunset. Completing their voyages two weeks later, the three mariners met in Honolulu, where they were welcomed like heroes.
Standing with Marcus and Roz in front of their vessels at a press conference, Joel talked about all the debris he saw at sea and the increasing amounts on the shores of Hawai'i. He described his work with NOAA's Marine Debris Program in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and how they removed ten tons of fishing nets and marine debris per month. Marcus showed a string of plastic lighters, bottle caps, fishing floats and all kinds of disposable things that he found inside the belly of a dead albatross. According to the EPA, millions of sea birds, fish, marine mammals and sea turtles ingest and become entangled in plastic marine debris each year.
Marcus also talked about all the plastic pieces they found inside the fish they caught and how these fragments attract persistent organic pollutants, including carcinogens like PCBs and DDT. "We have this issue of plastics in our environment," Marcus said, "but it's also a human health issue." When asked about solutions, Joel stated that, "To fix the problem, the first thing we need to do is stop using so much plastic, and then get your legislators to enact some kind of plastic ban."
In order to show people samples from their voyages on the Alguita and the Junk, Marcus and Anna decided to ride their bikes from Canada to Mexico as part of the Junk Ride Tour. While most couples would be planning for their wedding, this eccentric pair spent their engagement working to educate and engage people about the issue of plastic marine debris. The two pedaled out of Vancouver in April of 2009 and for the next two and a half months stopped in cities along the West Coast. During their presentations, they would talk about the Garbage Patch and hand out small jars of Pacific Ocean samples to groups of educators, legislators, fellow activists and local Surfrider Foundation groups. Mid-way through their trip, the couple decided to have a small, secret wedding near Big Sur, Calif. to celebrate their unique marriage of research, activism and adventure.
In early July of '09, Anna wrote in her blog about their biggest milestone: "After 2,000 miles of cycling, 9 flat tires, 40 talks, meetings with 5 mayors, and many joyful (some painful) hours in the saddle later, we finally crossed the border [of Mexico]!"
Currently, Marcus and Anna are engaged in what they call the 5 Gyres Project. This past January they set sail with a research group called Pangaea to explore the North Atlantic Gyre, which is one of five gyres in the world (North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean). They will continue collecting ocean samples, catching fish and doing tissue analyses for plastic and toxicity. Thinking of start a family, Anna underwent a body burden analysis last spring to see what petrochemicals were lurking in her own tissues. "We know that these chemicals are stored in our bodies," she said, "and the only way women rid themselves of these chemicals is through childbirth. What are we passing on through our bodies to the next generation?" she wondered.
Holding the small bottle filled with the Pacific Ocean sample from the Gyre, I stare at the mix of swirling milky plankton and floating colorful plastic confetti. I can only wonder what the future holds for our oceans and what Marcus and Anna will discover on their next voyage.