In 2003, British author Deborah Cadbury wrote a book called ‘Seven Wonders of the Industrial World’. The book tells the story of seven great feats of engineering of the 19th and 20th century. Her list includes the following:

• SS Great Eastern
• Bell Rock Lighthouse
• Brooklyn Bridge
• London sewerage system
• First Transcontinental Railroad
• Panama Canal
• Hoover Dam

The BBC, who made a seven-part documentary on Cadbury’s book, said the ‘wonders’ were a survey of modern engineering and development that ”illustrates the swiftly moving frontiers of technological progress in the 19th century. And each ‘wonder’ serves as a unique monument, a marker for what was known at the time it was created.” But as exciting as the structural integrity of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Hoover Dam might be, it surely pales in comparison to that thoroughly modern, transpacific spew stain of our era: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex) is a cluster of marine litter floating around the North Pacific Ocean somewhere between the United States and China. Due to difficulty measuring this enormous floating trash pancake, the exact dimensions of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are still unknown. Some experts put the patch at around the size of Texas, whilst others say that it could be bigger, even much bigger, than the whole of the United States.

So what does the Great Pacific Garbage Patch say about us and our lives in the 21st century? To examine the Pacific Garbage Patch, we need to look inside it, and at that positively modern substance: plastic. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is mostly made up of plastic that has been broken up into smaller and smaller pieces by ocean swells. The plastic floats in the upper regions of the ocean, where it is captured in the currents, and driven by surface winds toward a central point where it becomes trapped.

In 2009, a Scripps Institute of Oceanography survey on the patch found:

“Plastic debris was present in 100 consecutive samples taken at varying depths and net sizes along a 1,700 miles (2,700 km) path through the patch. The survey also confirmed that while the debris field does contain large pieces, it is on the whole made up of smaller items which increase in concentration towards the Gyre’s centre, and these ‘confetti-like’ pieces are clearly visible just beneath the surface.”

Here’s the nuts and bolts of it: if you toss a plastic bottle top into the ocean off the coast of California, it will eventually break into tiny pieces and wind up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in about six years. If you throw the same bottle top into the ocean from China, it will make its way to the vortex in less than a year. But that’s just the beginning of our floating dilemma.

The carpet of pacific plastic is eaten by small sea creatures, which are then eaten by larger ones, and then eventually by you, or the person sitting next to you in the nice seafood restaurant you like taking your parents to. And to make matters worse, the floating plastic pellets absorb pollutants such as PCBs, DDT, and PAHs, which end up in the bellies of critters who happen to be in the area for lunch. And if you’re a fish heading east or west across the pacific, a thousand or more kilometres is a long way between meals.

If a ‘Wonder of the Industrial World’ is proof of our modernization through industrialisation, then surely the Great Pacific Garbage Patch gets a prize — not for the merits of a clever or well-funded engineer or architect, but for the patch’s ability to show us the monumental and devastating effects of our modern, consumer carelessness.