Hoping to learn more about one of the most glaring examples of waste and environmental pollution on earth, a group of scientists will set sail from San Francisco today to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be twice the size of Texas.

The bobbing debris field, where currents swirl everything from discarded fishing line to plastic bottles into one soupy mess, is located about 1,000 miles west of California.

“This is a problem that is kind of out of sight, out of mind, but it is having devastating impacts on the ocean. I felt we needed to do something about it,” said Mary Crowley, co-founder of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit expedition that is partnering on the voyage with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.   Crowley — a Sausalito resident who owns a yacht chartering company, Ocean Voyages — has been sailing the Pacific Ocean for nearly 40 years.

“More and more now, you see signs of marine debris and plastic everyplace. You can be at very remote beaches, and you’ll see plastic bottles, barrels, toys and a lot of plastic fishing nets,” she said.  Not much is known about the garbage patch phenomenon, including when it began forming or even its exact boundaries. Scientists believe trash — most of it plastic that won’t decompose — washes down storm drains and rivers from places like the Bay Area or Japan, eventually drifting into several large ocean vortices where currents swirl like water in a drain.

Crowley formed a nonprofit group, Ocean Voyages Institute, which has helped raise $500,000 to send two ships to the garbage patch. Today, one of those ships, the 151-foot Kaisei — which means “ocean planet” in Japanese — sets sail for a 30-day voyage from San Francisco.  The other ship, the 170-foot New Horizon, owned by the University of California-San Diego, left Southern California on Sunday. It has a crew of about 20 people, many of them graduate students in marine biology, funded by a $600,000 grant from the University of California.

Both ships will study the garbage patch’s size, how the plastic affects wildlife and whether it may be possible to clean some of it up.  ”We are going to try to target the highest-plastic areas we see to begin to understand the scope of the problem,” said Miriam Goldstein, chief scientist of the Scripps expedition. “The team of graduate students will be studying everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to small midwater fish.”

Additionally, the Kaisei will take a documentary film crew and a group of international scientists. They will conduct similar research to the Scripps  scientists, along with experiments on whether certain types of netting and other equipment can efficiently remove the trash, perhaps recycling it or converting it into fuel during future cleanup voyages.  But cleaning up the Pacific garbage patch may not be possible.

First, most of the plastic is broken into tiny fragments. Plastic becomes brittle from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and eventually breaks up into minuscule pieces like confetti. Billions float just below the surface in the garbage patch, which is located north of Hawaii but shifts in size and location depending on the season and the currents.

“The large pieces, it is possible to pull them out of the ocean,” said Holly Bamford, director of the marine debris program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md.  ”The small plastic bits, that’s to be determined. Until we understand the extent, the size and exactly where they are, we won’t be able to make a determination of how they can be removed or if they can be removed.”  Bamford, who has a doctorate in atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, said the plastic harms wildlife. Not only have albatrosses and other sea birds died from ingesting plastic, which fills their stomachs without providing nutrition, but also plastic pieces can absorb toxic chemicals, which then could migrate up the food chain, even potentially contaminating fish that humans eat, she said.  Old plastic fishing lines, some from drift nets that weigh several tons, also entangle thousands of sea turtles, whales and marine mammals every year.

From 1996 to 2006, the NOAA removed 1.1 million pounds of derelict fishing gear from the reefs and beaches of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a chain of mostly uninhabited atolls and islands that stretch 1,500 miles from Kauai to Midway, near the garbage patch. The beaches on those islands, because of their proximity to the currents known as the North Pacific Gyre, often are littered with cigarette lighters, fishing line, floats, toothbrushes, bottle caps and other floating junk, some of which is decades old.

In the central Pacific, there are up to six pounds of marine litter to every pound of plankton, and roughly 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans, according to a 2006 report from the United Nations Environment Programme.  ”This stuff is ubiquitous,” Bamford said. “Plastics break into smaller and smaller pieces, but they don’t decompose.”

Marine scientists from California are venturing this week to the middle of the North Pacific for a study of plastic debris accumulating across hundreds of miles (km) of open sea dubbed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”  A research vessel carrying a team of about 30 researchers, technicians and crew members embarked on Sunday on a three-week voyage from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based at the University of California at San Diego.

The expedition will study how much debris — mostly tiny plastic fragments — is collecting in an expanse of sea known as the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, how that material is distributed and how it affects marine life.  The debris ends up concentrated by circular, clockwise ocean currents within an oblong-shaped “convergence zone” hundreds of miles (km) across from end to end near the Hawaiian Islands, about midway between Japan and the West Coast of the United States.  The focus of the study will be on plankton, other microorganisms, small fish and birds.

“The concern is what kind of impact those plastic bits are having on the small critters on the low end of the ocean food chain,” Bob Knox, deputy director of research at Scripps, said on Monday after the ship had spent its first full day at sea.  The 170-foot vessel New Horizon is equipped with a laboratory for on-board research, but scientists also will bring back samples for further study.

Little is known about the exact size and scope of the vast debris field discovered some years ago by fishermen and others in the North Pacific that is widely referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”  Large items readily visible from the deck of a boat are few and far between. Most of the debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the water surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite images.

The debris zone shifts by as much as a thousand miles north and south on a seasonal basis, and drifts even farther south during periods of warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures known as El Nino, according to information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Besides the potential harm to sea life caused by ingesting bits of plastic, the expedition team will look at whether the particles could carry other pollutants, such as pesticides, far out to sea, and whether tiny organisms attached to the debris could be transported to distant regions and thus become invasive species.

Scientists from UCSD will leave this weekend to explore a massive, nasty blob in the North Pacific that has been reported being the size of Texas or larger.  Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers will leave Sunday aboard the New Horizon for a nearly three-week expedition to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) will be the first of its kind, officials said, and will focus on, among other things, how the garbage patch is affecting ocean life and how fast it is accumulating. The exact size of the blob is unknown, something else the expedition will try to determine.

“There is little scientific information on the composition, extent and effects of the debris,” according to Scripps’ Web site.  What is known is that the blob is made up of accumulated trash, though the tiny pieces of plastic that make up the entire debris field are not detectable by planes overhead or satellites in space.  Can’t wait to find out what these brave scientists discover.

What we already know: We must reduce our plastic consumption. For starters, plastic is made from oil. More importantly, it’s not biodegradable.

A pair of scientific ships sets sail this month to explore another unusual ocean phenomenon: a giant floating patch of plastic. The currents of the swirling Pacific gyre northeast of Hawaii push some four million tons of plastic into a soupy mass nearly twice the size of Texas. It’s killing marine life and adding to the ocean’s toxic burden.

So scientists with Project Kaisei want to scoop up the plastic and put it to good use.