A noted oceanographer claims the aquatic pollution in the Pacific Ocean is too significant to be cleaned up.

“We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic,” Charles Moore, famous sailor and oceanographer, is quoted as saying on the CNET News.com’s Green Tech blog.

Moore says the volume of ocean plastic has ballooned fivefold in the past 10 years. Moore has studied a patch of garbage in the Pacific covering 2.5 million square miles.

Locally, Kate Willis Ladell has studied the issue of marine debris as part of her work with the Living Oceans Society, where she is campaign manager for marine planning and protected areas. Speaking to the Straight by phone on March 6, Ladell said she believes Moore’s claim is “very plausible”, though she added: “I would have to read the report.”

“I know there are tons of plastics in the oceans,” Ladell said. “From my own research out in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which serve as a comb in the Pacific, I have photographs of beaches just strewn with plastic bottles and glass bottles and glass floats and all sorts of stuff.”¦In the Atlantic Ocean, there is the Sargasso Sea, where the currents and the eddies have created this big floating mat, and what was once only seaweed, now I hear it is littered with trash and marine debris.”

Ladell said little work is being done to eradicate plastic and other garbage in the ocean off Canada’s west coast, but she said “it should be”.