now. that is the day it vanished. i ve been trying to put myself in the position of the families of the passengers, the families of the crew. my only reference is when i don t hear from my wife or one of our kids when they re supposed to calm. the families of flight 370 are still waiting for a phone call while praying an hoping against the odds that it might still bring good news. and yet we have no reason to believe that closure is coming soon. the search for missing flight 370 is proving more and more difficult every day. ten search planes, nine ships, and they re all looking for what one oceanographer has called a needle in a garbage patch. he s talking of course about the vast indian ocean. and consider this. it took 60 years to find the hms cindy, 80 years to find the titanic. they were much larger than the comparably tiny boeing 777 the australian prime minister described the task ahead. this is probably the most difficult search ever
time in the ocean. so its value has not been realized, hat not been thought of. even though the ocean is the life support system of the planet. it s the lungs of the planet. it s really what keeps it s what makes the earth a nice place to live. you said at the top of this segment that some scientists not sure who it was said it was like searching for a needle in a garbage patch. that s actually quite true. the ocean, for example plastic, every piece of plastic that s ever been made still exists. and it was first made in about 1909. and most of it is in the ocean. and we ve got these gyres that concentrate the plastic. it was interest to me that early in the search the satellites were picking up a lot of debris and garbage in the ocean. and i ve been down at the bottom of the ocean. i ve been to places that no one has ever been to before. it has not seen the light of day for billions of years. when i get there i find plastic on the sea floor. so we really do have a problem with trash
vast area, they don t really know where to look. they ve narrowed it down to an area about 85,000 square miles. that s an enormous area, almost difficult to con conceive of. they haven t even found a trace of debris yet, so it s a big challenge ahead of them, to say the least. jog fothey are in the middle huge garbage patch in the ocean, which is going to make it that much more difficult when they find something to differentiate whether it s trash or whether it s something very important for that flight and for solving this mystery. matthew chance. thank you, matthew. more news breaking overnight. another strong earthquake off the coast of chile, this one measuring 7.6, leading to evacuations along that country s northern coast. this a day after an 8.2-magnitude quake rattled that same region, leaving six people dead and thousands of homes damaged. no word yet on damage or injuries from that latest quake. all right, breaking news
i think so. that s something all of us are hoping for. this is drawing attention to something that is largely an invisible issue for most people. the indian ocean garbage patch wasn t discovered until 2010 by groups going across the ocean to see if there was a garbage patch there. similar to a fairly well known garbage patch called the great pacific garbage patch. the cargo containers? i came up from philly on a train, and you see them along i-95 stacked. i m reading a tremendous number of them fall overboard? they re a part of the garbage picture you re describing? right, exactly. cargo ships, cruise liners and again, just about every river in the world drains into an ocean and it s full of carrying everything in that river into the ocean. mark, thank you very much,
this is why when i go to trader joes, i have my own bag now? absolutely. we re talking about those bags coming back to haunt us? those bags, children s toys, anything you can think of that s made of plastic, if you look around your house or office, just imagine how much of that is plastic. where is it coming from? are some countries worse polluters than others? it s difficult to say what the source is of these vast garbage patches. some countries produce more waste than others. some waste comes from cruise lines or cargo ships. it tends to come from all of us since all of us use plastic and throw it away. are you surprised that by now three plus weeks into this, that garbage, debris from the plane has not yet come ashore to some land mass? given the nature of the ocean currents in that area, it s not surprising.