Great Pacific Trash Patch

In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus spends each Halloween in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin -- to no avail. If he'd headed out to another patch, the Great Pacific Trash Patch any day of the year, there'd be a lot to find -- but no pumpkins.

The Patch is a swirling, 3-million-pound mass of plastic and other trash that covers an area twice the size of Texas, according to researchers with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which has been tracking the Patch for a decade. And it's not going away.

That's a big problem for ocean wildlife, like albatross that nest in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Foraging adults mistake trash for food, and fill the bellies of their growing chicks with debris (including cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, syringes, toys, clothespins and every other type of plastic). On Midway Atoll alone, 40 percent of albatross chicks die from trash filling their bellies. By some estimates, they feed their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year.

There are rays of hope. A new law in California takes effect in 2009 and require manufacturers of nurdles -- the BB-sized pre-production plastic pellets that are the basis of all plastic products -- to prevent nurdle spills into waterways.

And each of us, wherever we live, can make a difference: by using fewer disposable plastic products, and by picking up plastic litter wherever we find it.

You can learn more in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Altered Oceans; and you can meet a Laysan albatross, and get the story firsthand, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.