I'm sure by now you've heard of the Pacific Ocean garbage patch, and a variety of "facts" that surround it. If you haven't, let's briefly describe what is usually meant by the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean.

A 'garbage island' in the middle of the Pacific?
The Pacific Ocean garbage patch has often been referred to as an island that consists entirely of trash, which is about twice the size of the state of Texas and located somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. The trash is a very thick layer that you can barely get through on a boat. And if we don't do anything, it will only keep getting bigger and bigger until we might as well walk on garbage across the Pacific. How true is all this? Here are 4 secrets that may surprise you about the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean:

1) It's not an island!


Oceanographers that traveled to examine the garbage patch in recent years have all discovered that the garbage patch is not actually a 'patch' per se. It's more like a thick plastic soup, which is pretty much all over the ocean. So, the good news is that the garbage is not so thick that you can't get through it in a huge area like twice the size of the Texas. But the bad news is that it's everywhere, but distributed thinly. This makes the prospects of clean-up virtually impossible or extremely impractical.