The Gyre

I saw the island of debris in the middle of the lake/pond, where the turbulence created by the waterfalls led to a vortex.

It made me think of that great island of rubbish in... the Sargasso Sea? Ah - the Sargasso Sea has its own smaller accumulation, but the big one is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). It is located between California and Hawaii, covering roughly 1.6 million sq km (twice the size of Texas or three times France). It is not a solid, visible island, but a high-concentration "soup" of 1.8 trillion microplastics and fishing nets.

The gyre... there's a Yeats poem... The Gyres... it seems... somewhat apt...

The turning cycles... accept the destruction... hard to do. I just finished a book called The Outpost by a rather sweet guy called Dan something. I liked it. He went to various, well, outposts. One was Svalbard and there he writes about polar bears. He talks of how the bears expect that there will be ice in the sea, so they set out, swimming. And swimming. And swimming. He tells a story of a mother bear and two cubs who set off.... however much later and after however many miles of fruitless swimming to search for sea ice, the mother and one cub came to land.

I think of that. And the quolls who expect that they must mate with a large number of females, but the females are few and so spread out that the males exhaust themselves. the birds making nests of optical wire. The albatrosses feeding plastic to their chicks.

Vicious cycles.

The following day, still kind of obsessed by the whirlpool effect, I opted for a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKwy0wuGGlA

Stop. It's all too sad.

This is a more peaceful image.