A team will study the trashing of our oceans

Since reading Alan Riseman's extremely depressing book, "The World Without Us", I've been trying to find evidence that there are places in the Pacific Ocean the size of California that are filled with plastic and trash. Yesterday I attended a National Wildlife Federation's training on Global Warming and there was a PhD student there from the University of South Florida who was also attending. I asked her about it and she said that one of her oceanography classes had pictures of this. I found this website for a team of researchers that will be investigating the trash situation in the Pacific. This should be interesting to follow. Maybe we can learn more about this situation from their study.