Message from the Gyre

We've all heard about the giant islands of floating trash in both the Atlantic and Pacific. These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September 2009 on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

Comments

[salon_1928]

The last photo is pretty ironic - even when the body totally decomposses, the plastic remains. Midway will probably be a plastics junkyard at some point.

[deerhawk]

..."Plastics my boy, Plastics!"...

[DDG]

Please tell the Chinese.