The San Francisco Chronicle reports on:

[...] the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii. [...]

I call bullshit.

First of all: twice the size of Texas? Don’t you think there would be some impressive pictures of this somewhere? I mean, have you ever been to Texas? Even on the scale of the North Pacific Ocean, it’s big. And when you double it, it’s nearly twice the size!

You could fly over that area for hours without reaching the edges.

And then, has anyone done the math? Twice the size of Texas, 3.5 million tons.

Texas = 266,807 square miles

2x = 533,614 square miles

3.5 million tons = 7,000,000,000 pounds

7 billion / 533614 = 13118 pounds per square mile = .0005 pound or 1/125 of an ounce of debris per square foot. A plastic grocery bag weighs about 3/4 ounce, so the debris is such that one grocery bag is spread over about 93 square feet.

Which is probably a problem if it’s true — but the people telling me this have already lied to me, characterizing the weight of a plastic bag in an area about the size of my office as a ‘heap’ and an ‘island’ — so why should I believe the rest of what they have to say?