The growth of 1 to 4 plastic islands in the last 20 years in our oceans, these "ecological aberrations" that have formed new polluting spaces in the seas of planet Earth oceans continues unstoppable and will not stop at least in the short term.
This is the sad result of a study carried out by a team of Australian experts who came to the conclusion that these are almost dead zones of ocean "the amount of rubbish is so great that if at some point it were decided to dredge these spaces, the amount of plastic rubbish would exceed that of biomass" says the director of the team, Erik Van Sebelle.
The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science has focused its research on understanding how these "garbage islands" form and how long it takes them to disappear.
The results are not very encouraging for the planet: we will have to wait at least 500 years for these gigantic masses to disappear, provided that we stop dumping rubbish into the oceans, which is not happening at the moment.
Even if we were to stop dumping any more rubbish into the seas at the moment, the rubbish that is already dispersed will take hundreds of years to reach these large formations, if it has not been accidentally eaten along the way by some bird or other marine animal that mistook it for food.
The first of these gigantic masses of garbage was discovered by oceanographer Charles Moore in 1997 and he named it "the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a mega-zone of waste located between the Californian coast, surrounding Hawaii and reaching Japan. Since then, macro-blocks of garbage have been discovered, including one in the South Pacific that is in the process of formation, off the coast of northern Chile.
Hundreds of thousands of marine species die every year due to accidentally consuming plastics.
Reference: Climate Science (Australia)
ES_ES 
EN