In the summer of 1997, sea captain and surfer Charles Moore was sailing home from Hawaii. He’d been recently finished the TransPacific Yacht Race, and on the way back to California, he decided to take a shortcut. Instead of following the current that swoops along the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, he set a course through the still waters of the high-pressure zone at its center. “1997 was the largest El Niño on record,” he recalled years later. “It had the warmest surface water in the Pacific,” which made the waters extremely smooth and calm. As Moore passed through, he noticed something: trash—specifically plastic trash—all around. This remote part of the ocean was, he told Stephen Colbert in 2010, “a disgusting plastic cesspool.”

JUNK RAFT: AN OCEAN VOYAGE AND A RISING TIDE OF ACTIVISM TO FIGHT PLASTIC POLLUTION by Marcus Eriksen Beacon Press, 216 pp., $26.95

News of Moore’s discovery quickly took on a life of its own. The swirl of debris came to be known variously as the great Pacific garbage patch, the Pacific trash vortex and the island of floating trash. It was a colorful symbol of an often overlooked problem. Global warming had its starving polar bear; now, ocean pollution had its Frankenstein trash island. By 2012, one particular image of the patch attached to much of the coverage. It showed a stretch of ocean completely clogged with brightly colored plastic flotsam. Only after looking at the image for a while could you notice the man in a boat in the center of the frame, a Where’s Waldo stranded in a scene of environmental catastrophe.

But that picture wasn’t taken at the garbage patch. It was taken near the shore in the Bay of Manila. The plastic pollution in the gyre is far less visible. “It wasn’t like an island of trash like people keep wanting to say,” Moore clarified in an interview with Earth Island Journal. “It’s just that I couldn’t survey the surface of the ocean for any period of time while standing on deck without seeing some anthropogenic debris float by.” A new book on ocean plastics, Junk Raft, by Marcus Eriksen, sifts through the myth of the gyre and explains that while the image of a hulking trash island is false, what’s there instead is even more worrisome. Part memoir, part clean-ocean manifesto, Junk Raft tells the story of Eriksen’s own visit to the gyre, travelling on a raft made of throwaway plastics. “There’s no island, no garbage patch,” Eriksen writes of what he finds when he arrives. “This was much worse.”

Instead of a trash island, Eriksen and his sailing partner Joel Paschal find an ocean full of plastic fragments. Battered by the ocean and degraded by the sun, the plastics that make it all the way to the gyre are, for the most part, not whole objects, but little shreds and particles. Some of these float at the surface of the water, where they attract fish and seabirds in search of food. Eriksen wants to replace the old and inaccurate images of the garbage island, which, he writes, “don’t capture the distribution, toxicity, or widespread harm to marine life.” Instead, we should think of the plastic in the ocean as a kind of smog: swirls of particulate matter surrounding the creatures who live and breathe and eat underwater. “Imagine if you could stand on the ocean floor and look up and see only the plastic,” he explains:

You would see five massive clouds of microplastic in the subtropical gyre and dark clouds of larger plastic pieces coming from the world’s largest rivers and densely populated coastlines… All around you would be a mist of dust-like microplastic fragments settling to the seafloor.

Traveling by raft, Eriksen and Paschal make their way into the gyre the way that plastic garbage does—passively carried along by the current. Along the way the pair run up against storms, boat trouble, gastrointestinal distress. Eriksen describes, too, the rise of plastics and plastic pollution, the chemistry that makes these materials so persistent and pernicious, and the lengths that the industry has gone to in order to to dodge responsibility for safely disposing of the plastics it creates. By the time we reach the gyre, plastics—especially those items designed to be immediately disposed of—seem to be not just the source of an ecological problem but inherently sinister.