In June, Ben Lecomte set out on a boat from Hawaii to spend 80 days swimming through the world’s largest collection of marine litter.
The 52-year old Frenchman, who has been based in the US since 1991, swam for up to eight hours at a time within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In total, he swam 300 nautical miles.
Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, the garbage spans an area between North America and Japan of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers — three times the size of France, and more than double the size of Texas. It is bounded by an enormous gyre — spinning oceanic currents that pull trash towards the center and trap it there, creating a garbage vortex.
A recent survey estimates that at least 79,000 metric tons of plastic swirl around the patch. Between 10% and 20% of the debris is thought to have been swept out to sea by the Tohoku tsunami which struck the coast of Japan in 2011.
Source: Long-distance swimmer dives into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
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