What is the name of the large area of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean?

The large area of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

It is not a solid island of rubbish but a broad, shifting concentration of mostly plastic debris trapped by the circulating currents of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The debris ranges from abandoned fishing nets and larger consumer objects to tiny fragments and microplastics suspended near the surface, making much of the patch invisible from satellites or passing ships.

The accumulation was predicted in scientific work in 1988, and sailor Charles J. Moore brought wider public attention to it after encountering heavy debris concentrations in 1997. Researchers generally describe the patch as an area of unusually high debris density rather than a precisely bounded geographic object; its estimated size therefore varies with sampling methods.

The North Pacific Gyre is the current system that helps concentrate the material, not the debris patch’s canonical name. The Sargasso Sea is a naturally defined region of the North Atlantic known for floating sargassum, so it is unrelated to this Pacific pollution zone. Similar, smaller garbage patches also occur in other ocean gyres.