A Plastic Oasis in the Sea

When renowned long-distance swimmer Benoît Lecomte set off from Hawaii in the summer of 2019, he didn’t expect to uncover a new ecosystem. He was simply going for a swim. In the year prior he had freestyled his way from Japan to Hawaii; now he would continue from Hawaii to California, but with a twist. He wanted to go through a region of the ocean that almost no one ever visits, let alone swims through, a region synonymous in the public imagination with  environmental degradation: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Created by systems of circular currents that act almost like giant whirlpools, pulling debris inside and trapping it there, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans roughly 600,000 square miles. The name is something of a misnomer—it evokes floating islands of junk, whereas account for most of the garbage—but the patch is unquestionably polluted. Since its discovery in 1997, it