Il s' agit d' une trés importante suspension de plastique divers qui se concentrent dans le centre d' un vaste courant océanique tournant dans le sens des aiguilles d' une montre dans le pacifique Nord.
Les iles de Hawai en récoltent plein aussi.
J' avais vu ca décrit également soit dans le bouquin de Lester Brown (le Plan B) , soit dans celui de Jared Diamond (Effondrement), je sait plus exactement.
Greenpeace en parle la :
http://www.greenpeace.org/international ... ash-vortex
et comme dit dans le texte de Greenpeace, Thalassa à montré une autopsie d' un goéland mort, avec pleins de débris de plastique dans l' estomac, dont un de la taille d' un tube d' aspirine.The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of an area the size of Texas swirling slowly around like a clock. This gyre has also been dubbed “the Asian Trash Trail” the “Trash Vortex” or the “Eastern Garbage Patch”.
This perhaps wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the plastic had no ill effects. The larger items, however, are consumed by seabirds and other animals which mistake them for prey. Many seabirds and their chicks have been found dead, their stomachs filled with medium sized plastic items such as bottle tops, lighters and balloons. A turtle found dead in Hawaii had over a thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach and intestines. It has been estimated that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement.
Animals can become entangled in discarded netting and line. Even tiny jelly-fish like creatures become entangled in lengths of plastic filament, or eat the small plastic particles floating in the water.

Les expéditions de recherche montrent que le nombre de déchet plastique est en trés forte augmentation ces derniéres années.
Je suppose que c' est du à l' industrialisation et l' augmentation du niveau de vie en Asie.