Sea Camp: These Critters Call The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Home

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this second installment of the Sea Camp series, we explore the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's the largest of five gigantic garbage patches in the sea. These patches hang out at the nexus of the world's ocean currents, changing shape with the waves. These areas were long thought to have been uninhabited, the plastics and fishing gear too harmful to marine life. But researchers have uncovered a whole ecosystem of life in this largest collection of trash. Today, with the help of marine biologist Fiona Chong, we meet the tiny marine life that calls this place home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from Curiosity Weekly.
0:02.6	Science isn't just in the lab.
0:04.5	It's in the voices of people expanding what counts as science
0:08.0	and opening up whose science is really for.
0:11.0	Listen to Curiosity Weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:15.6	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:20.7	Hey, Sherwavers, it's Regina Barber.
0:22.8	And Emily Kwong.
0:23.9	Back with our second episode in our summer series, Sea Camp.
0:27.5	Okay, M.
0:28.5	Last week, we talked with our producer Hannah Chin about the interface of air and water.
0:33.3	What do we have for today?
0:34.5	Like, where are we going?
0:35.5	We're staying in the same place.
0:36.6	We're just going to linger at the surface of the ocean a bit longer.
0:39.3	But I wanted to visit one very famous type of ecosystem full of biodiversity and richness.
0:46.0	Okay, where is that?
0:47.1	I am talking about a garbage patch.
0:53.5	Trash as far as the eye can see., garbage floating for miles in the ocean.
0:58.3	It's an image you've probably seen pictures of affixed to an article about ocean pollution
1:03.8	or climate change. It's an image most people turn away from, but not marine biologist Fiona Chong.
1:10.1	A garbage patch is a floating collection of plastic debris that came from land but has ended up in the oceans.
	...

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