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Comment by robinj6 | Hacker News Reader

This is a misleading title regularly used by the media. TLDR: This area has a higher concentration of micro-particles. It is not visible to the naked eye.

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What would a less misleading headline be? "High concentration of plastic found in ocean area bigger than Mexico"?

It seems like this is still a pretty significant phenomenon, even if it's not visible to the naked eye.

Agreed. But that doesn't justify making it sound like there's a Mexico garbage barge out there.

"Mexico garbage barge" sounds like it be a great band name.

This post is either meta or deja-vu... I swear someone commented this last week.

Is the methane in the atmosphere visible to the naked eye? Guess it's not significant.

If the average reader imagines a dense raft of plastic bags and water bottles the size of Mexico, it's a bad headline.

I don't consider myself stupid, yet that's exactly what I imagined when I read the headline.

imo it's worse that it's particles instead of complete plastic objects.

The tiny particles are near-impossible to clean, hard to identify (without testing), and are arguably more dangerous to the wildlife.

The problem is that this sort of article gets "spun" into a much worse one. Complete with the infamous "floating garbage so bad you can't see water underneath it" photo. People immediately conjure up images of a floating garbage island that is larger than Mexico. Not to mention how catchy and self-gratifying it is to share such a spun article on social media where the conveniently "picked" photo happens to be the floating-garbage one. This is why we can't have nice things and reasonable discussions on nuanced topics.

"A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes"

It is a very serious problem, and it needs to be fixed.

For the two situations - loads of large trash floating at the surface or 4 particles per cubic metre suspended at all depths - you get very different solutions.

Look how popular that solar-powered ocean plastic scoop thing is, and how useless it is.

I imagine a fleet of self-replicating wave glider / baleen barges that slowly, relentlessly ply the oceans, gathering the bulk materials to make their offspring.

"Wave Glider Plastic Micro-Particle Cleanup Patch Bigger Than Mexico Found in Pacific (2031)"

Thanks for this. Based on the headline I assumed there was a massive floating landfill-"like island. Im assuming many others did as well.

Did you consider how high you imagined the "landfill-like island"? Is it reasonable to imagine a landfill is 10 miles high? 1 mile? 1 meter? 1 millimeter?

Perhaps your expectations are so skewed by clickbait that you didn't recognize that it's closer to an accurate description than being clickbait.

This is a strangely toxic response.

"Micro-particles" might also be misleading. The article spells it out:

The pieces of plastic are not necessarily floating bottles, bags, and buoys, but teeny-tiny pieces of plastic resembling confetti, making them almost impossible to clean up.

You're right - this is misleading; because it's worse!

Micro-particles are much worse than a complete piece of plastic floating around, it means that's it's broken down to the point where smaller organisms (Such as - I don't know, those that create oxygen for us to breathe). These organisms are highly susceptible to these plastics and it is incredibly toxic to them. They create way more oxygen then most people are aware of.

Those microorganisms are the grass and bugs of the ocean, the entire food chain depends on them.

What happens when krill eats microorganisms that ate plastic? What happens to the blue whales that eat the krill, or the yellowfin tuna that eat the schooling fish that eat these microorganisms?

Remember DDT? This could be so much worse.

It's better than calling it an island which I would definitely assume means "visible".

The patch is not easily visible, because it consists of tiny pieces almost invisible to the naked eye.[7] Most of its contents are suspended beneath the surface of the ocean,[8] and the relatively low density of the plastic debris is, according to one scientific study, 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer of ocean area (5.1 mg/m2).[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

Maybe the headline should have been "Plastic Garbage Patch Bigger Than Mexico, and far less dense than the air above Mexico, Found..."

And, most of the world's plastic is not recycled. It will stay that way for eons unless bacteria spread which break it down.

http://relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/publi...

There’s nothing misleading about the headline, as your TL;DR negates nothing in the headline nor the article. Making a bunch of assumptions, which later turn out to be wrong, does not make the headline misleading. If you’d like to argue that there is, in fact, no garbage patch at all, fine. But just because you assumed that you could see it, when in fact you can’t, doesn’t mean the headline is wrong.

> There’s nothing misleading about the headline

According to the NOAA (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/garbagepatch.html) "The name "Pacific Garbage Patch" has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter—akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.".

Looks like the very definition of "misleading".

I think this is a case of insufficient nomenclature. Do we have more appropriate wording that doesn't negate it's usefulness in correctness by being too lengthy?

"Plastic particles patch" would be more accurate but it doesn't sound as bad.

It also somewhat loses in impact because it's not immediately obvious that it's because of sea pollution, which "garbage" does a good job of conveying. You get there through some (admittedly short) reasoning, but that's probably what they were trying to avoid.

Plastic pollution patch, then? But it's true that "garbage" does a very good job of conveying the desired (misleading) image.

I'm not sure that simply because it's not visible to the naked eye that doesn't mean it's not garbage.

I am confused. What is misleading in the title? Just because it's invisible doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Is this really the kind of thing we need to argue semantics about? We're doomed as a society if this is the top voted comment.

OK, we put 'micro-particle' in the title above.

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