Pacific Garbage Patch Twice the Size of Texas

It strains credulity, but there's a heap of floating garbage, consisting mostly of plastic trash, floating in the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii that's twice the size of Texas and weighing in at some 3.5 million tons!

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

The garbage is being trapped by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, "a swirling vortex of ocean currents comprising most of the northern Pacific Ocean. It is located between the equator and 50º N latitude and occupies an area of approximately ten million square miles."