Sucked into the Atlantic Garbage Patch

On so many levels the Sargasso Sea is like a whirlpool: literally if you consider the spinning of the North Atlantic Gyre -- and, of course, figuratively.

In the days of sail, it was rumored that this lonely mid-ocean expanse sucked in ships, trapping them in the floating weed. Then in the 20^th century that myth became the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and modern ships would disappear into a time warp.

Popular vision of the Sargasso as a malignant sea -- more dangerous, presumably, than smoking Wills's Cigarettes. Picture courtesy of www.lookandlearn.com

All that’s disproved. But for our unheroic age, we have a third iteration of the whirlpool: a truly monstrous, irresistible force that pulls in floating rubbish and trapping it, like the ships of old, forever.

Environmentalists like to call the Sargasso the “rainforest of the ocean.” And true, this is a marvelous ecosystem with no real parallel. But that rainforest has earned a new name that tells the story of our times: “Atlantic Garbage Patch.”

On our sail through the heart of the Sargasso on “Moon River,” we witnessed both sides.

Golden sargassum weed stretched across Mediterranean-blue waves, their fronds brimming with life: small fish, crabs, shrimps, strings and strings of eggs. Whales were a regular sight.

Yet in this same ultra-clear water, many hundreds of miles from land, we also confronted the astonishing reach of society’s destructiveness.

Everywhere we found detritus from our wasteful, careless world: plastic bottles, what resembled a New York City coffee cup, fishing nets, fishing buoys, a container for motor oil, packaging, and even what might have been a white garden chair.

Huge abandoned plastic buoy from a fishing boat. Ironically, it has attracted several large tripletail fish (just visible to the right). They seem to prefer objects in the water as opposed to open sea and here, hundreds, even thousands of miles from anywhere except Bermuda, they're cozying up to floating rubbish.

Considering how far we were off the beaten track, this all seemed beyond belief. And the real tragedy is that the junk -- jettisoned from ships in the Sargasso, or pulled in by currents from the outside – was going to stay there forever.

The plastic circulates in the currents of the great gyre in exactly the same way as the debris drawn in depictions of the Sea of Lost Ships, that nightmarish, imaginary body of water that collected rotting Roman galleys, Spanish galleons and contemporary vessels alike.

Just as with the similar (and much more publicized) Pacific Garbage Patch, there’s no way to clean up the Atlantic’s floating junk pile.

Beyond the visible garbage, thinly scattered across enormous distances, there is a much greater accumulation of micro plastic to contend with. Fragments are widely enmeshed in the sargassum weed, while even smaller bits, along with their poisonous chemicals, are ingested by fish and so passed right along the food chain – eventually right onto the plates in fancy restaurants.

“The question is, how do you actually clean that? The plastic that is degraded is so small that the only thing we can do now is minimize the new plastic,” said Dr Samia Sarkis, a marine biologist working for the Sargasso Sea Alliance, a Bermuda-based conservation group.

“Reducing plastic is very hard to do,” Sarkis said, chatting aboard “Moon River” when we were anchored in Bermuda’s harbor of Saint George. “And the problem is that the very small particles are very good at concentrating toxins. When you get animals like whales who ingest vast quantities of water and plastic, it’s a huge problem.”

The impossibility of tackling existing garbage is one problem. The other problem is getting everyone who uses the ocean to agree on rules for preventing new pollution. Environmental regulations are often tricky to introduce, but nowhere are they harder than on the high seas – the international waters comprising the largest (and most lawless) area of our planet.

That leaves Bermuda looming significantly in the fight for the Sargasso, since it is the only land that can claim to lie within this mid-ocean sea.

“Bermuda is a place where you can say, ‘I can see what’s there,’” said Philippe Rouja, a prominent marine expert working with the Sargasso Sea Alliance and who is also in charge of Bermuda’s historic shipwrecks.

The high seas part of the ocean, for most people, he said, may as well be “outer space.”

Next March, government ministers and international organizations around the Atlantic are supposed to sign a non-binding declaration of intent to collaborate on protecting the Sargasso.

That may sounds like just talk, but it puts the uncharted Sargasso on the political map. And the Alliance is simultaneously pushing Bermuda’s government to turn a large portion of its own 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone into a marine protection area, or “Blue Halo.” The process starts with public consultations in September and hopes are that the island, in establishing the first Sargasso sanctuary, will encourage the international community to expand such a halo right across the high seas.

Already the project has won strong support from Philippe Cousteau, Jr, grandson of the legendary Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and in September the Alliance will be given the prestigious International SeaKeepers Society annual award.

“It’s an exciting time. If Bermuda can get this done, it’s going to set the tone for the rest of the ocean,” said Chris Flook, who represents the Pew Environmental Group in the Blue Halo project.

“There are so many tragic stories in the oceans. This could be a bit of hope.”

Sailing slowly through on “Moon River,” however, I could only think how odd – and sad – it is that of all the terrible phenomena associated with the Sargasso over the centuries, the garbage patch is the most sinister. And real.

In legend, man has always looked to the watery depths for his worst nightmare: his Kraken, his Jaws, even Nessie. But it seems that the true sea monsters are found right on the surface: in our own reflections.