The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a site of marine debris considered to be twice the size of Texas, is perhaps the foremost expression of the impact of plastic waste on our world and the role of humans in environmental degradation.

It has been popularized through media coverage as the world turns its focus to plastic pollution, but misrepresented by misattributed photos that claim to show matted, flat surface debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is incorrectly believed to be visible from space and described as the “world’s biggest landfill”; a so-called trash vortex where plastic is “piling up.”

But it’s just one manifestation of the many ways man-made environmental destruction has taken phenomenal hold of our natural world. Its alleged dramatic aesthetics fail to fully address the impact of the waste and the root of the global plastics problem. So, to understand its mythology and get to the bottom of what the GPGP really means for the planet, I went to see it for myself.

It takes over one thousand miles from shore to get there, departing from the West Coast and straight into the Pacific. Land fades from sight and the world around the ship becomes only water and sky. I set out this past September from Ensenada, Mexico with a photographer to bear witness as a guest of Greenpeace, the decades-old non-governmental environmental organization whose oceans campaign team conducted research from aboard their icebreaker, the Arctic Sunrise. The 21-day-long expedition at sea shed light on and debunked prevalent ideas — mainly that the ocean, in any part, can be "cleaned up" from the mess humans have made.

We traveled directly toward the gyre, stopping only once for the engineers to make midnight repairs to the ship. Upon arrival, which took days, I expected to see trash everywhere, piled high as I heard it would be. What I saw was different and certainly no island. As Greenpeacers described to me, and as I witnessed, the GPGP is more of a "soupy mixture," with its most buoyant pieces of large, tough plastic joined by fishing debris at the very top of the water's surface and countless microplastics immediately — indefinitely — below. There was no oversized heap like I was expecting. There was no matted debris. Just vast sea, a few seabirds, and a touch of marine life amid a noticeably high concentration of waste.

It’s home to a severe problem and is a visible manifestation of “throwaway” culture, wherein much of our economy and daily lives rely on plastics, most of which are disposed of after one use.

The GPGP was discovered in 1997 by marine researcher Charles Moore and named by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. It became known as “Trash Isles,” thanks to a pair of advertisers who appealed to the United Nations to have the area become the world's 196th country on World Oceans Day in 2017. The campaign was marketed well, and public understanding of the GPGP was generally founded on the notion that an “island” of trash had been discovered.

That misconception installed the impression that the impact of plastic pollution will be visible to the eye. The area is in the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, 1,200 nautical miles offshore, where very few have ventured to bear witness, so widespread misunderstanding persists.

It is in the largest and perhaps most well-known one of the world’s five ocean gyres, or systems of circulating ocean currents. It is one of three major “garbage patches” found within these gyres where, over time, plastic debris has coalesced. The mass of trash hits its peak in the center of the GPGP’s most concentrated area, which fluctuates with conditions. Ships can enter easily, but even in its outermost zones, floating plastic debris appears with great frequency.