The Great Ocean Garbage Dumps

Ever walked along the beach and seen plastic bottles and rubbish washed up along with the seaweed and cuttlefish? Or looked down at the harbour while waiting for a ferry and noticed the scummy floaters of rubbish collecting in the backwash by the jetty wall? And then did you ever wonder, if this is the stuff that I can see, what does the rest of the ocean look like?

Well, a group of French explorers, has confirmed that the North Atlantic, at least, is a rubbish tip.

''Ninety-five per cent of the stuff is plastics, from toothpaste tubes to aerosol containers and water bottles,'' said Mr Geffriaud, the founder of Watch the Waste*, a group that asks mariners to monitor rubbish.
(*The site is French language only)

Read the full article

But that's not the only one.

There is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii, and off the coast of Japan, "three times the size of Texas and a seeming doldrums where the world’s plastics collect and degrade." - What it’s like



So this is just the floating stuff that people can see from boats.
What must the bottom of the oceans be like?

And here's a crazy thought. If we were to take all our rubbish back out of the oceans, would that help lower our rising sea levels?