Chris Jordan’s Pacific Gyre

Chris Jordan, the artist from Seattle, has come out with mind wrenching pictures from the Pacific Gyre or the Great Pacific garbage patch. The gyre, is amidst spiraling currents and measures twice of what US does (in size). The garbage patch, is not filled up with garbage, but it is famous for the waste and other debris that has accumulated over the years. This waste products get accumulated due to the clockwise currents traveling between Japan and N.America.

Jordan is known for taking gut-wrenching photographs and his famous works include, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption, and Running The Numbers. His photographs are taken from the garbage dumps and also depicts USA consumerism. His work, although bold is also said to be quite “unsettling”.The photos he brought back from The Gyre, shows the carcasses of dead albatross chicks, whose cause of death remains the ingestion of garbage disposed by humans. Their bellies have been substituted with plastic wastes.

The Pacific Gyre, has been described as the “Trash vortex” , littered with marine garbage and lies in the North pacific Ocean. The patch has a high number of plastic and different debris, trapped because of the currents of the North Pacific gyre. The garbage pieces are so small, that the Gyre cannot be detected by the satellites also, even though it is huge in size and also density. However, most of the substances are beneath the surface of the ocean. It was predicted in 1988 by a US paper, which was based on the 1985-1988 researches done in Alaska. It is said that 80% of the waste comes from land and the rest comes from the ships sailing in the sea.