Kamilo Beach is, arguably, the world’s dirtiest beach. Located on the southeastern coast on the island of Hawaii, the beach’s sands are littered with marine debris – most of it plastic waste washed up from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Among this garbage, Patricia Corcoran and Kelly Jazvac have discovered something new.
Inspired by a lecture from renowned oceanographer Charles Moore, Corcoran, a geologist and Earth Sciences professor, and Jazvac, an artist and Visual Arts professor, headed to Kamilo Beach to discover what was there. What they found was an array of rock formations, with plastics fused within. They called it ‘Plastiglomerate.’
“They’ve cleaned up most of it, but there’s still a lot of plastic material we find on the beach, a lot of larger intact fragments, strange things, bowls and cups and spoons and pails and slippers and flip-flops,” Corcoran said. “A lot of the big pieces of this material had already been taken away, but there were still a lot of fragments buried in the sand. "Basically, in geology, a conglomerate is a rock made of many different fragments, and because this has plastic, I just thought Plastiglomerate was appropriate,” she added.
Plastiglomerate is the first type of rock formation influenced by humankind, and, so far, it has only been found on Kamilo Beach, though it is likely in existence elsewhere.
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Photo via Patricia Corcoran
