Stunning photos of birds filled with plastic
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is often referred to as a huge floating island of trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists don't know exactly how big it is, although many estimate that it's the size of the state of Texas or even twice that.
But for all the talk about the enormity of this floating trash island and its detrimental affect on marine life, it's not easy to visualize. You can't see the mounds of plastic debris with the naked eye or satellite photos because most of the plastic has broken down into tiny pieces that lie beneath the ocean's surface.
Photographer Chris Jordan, who has captured the essence of American mass consumption and tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina on film, has found a way to document the impact of the vast amounts of discarded plastic on marine life.
In the fall of 2009, Jordan visited the Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and photographed the astounding evidence of human garbage found inside the bellies of albatross chicks. The baby birds are fed plastic debris by their parents who mistake it for food. As a result, hundreds of thousands of albatross babies are poisoned, choked, or suffer from deadly blockages every year.
Jordan says in his blog that his photographs portray the actual stomach contents of the baby birds and that the plastic was not "moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way."
You can see more of these photos, as well as larger versions, in Jordan's "Midway: Message from the Gyre" gallery on his website. All photos used here with permission.
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