More than a thousand kilometers from the mainland in the central North Pacific, the ship's captain and oceanographer Charles Moore did not understand where so much garbage had come from.
"It can't be a trail of crumbs like Ivica and Marica's that should lead me home," he remembers thinking.
"This must be a wider phenomenon."
After two years of research and modeling, he returned to investigate it more closely.
"That's when we had a moment of revelation," he says.
Using a net system to take samples from the surface of the ocean, he found that there is six times more plastic floating in the ocean than plankton.
Mur stumbled upon the largest of the five piles of garbage found around the world.
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Formed by swirling ocean currents known as eddies, they act like eddies of trash, sucking up plastic and constantly changing.
Since its discovery, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) has often been described in the media as floating mass of plastic, and is called i garbage island.
However, contrary to popular belief, there is no surface that can be stood on and cannot be seen from space.
"It wasn't a mountain of trash, it wasn't a field of trash, it wasn't even a pile of trash," says Moore.
Instead, the ocean looked like a murky soup made of plastic of varying sizes.
This makes it difficult to visualize.
"There is no photograph of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," says Moore.
Satellites, drones and Google Earth have trouble getting a clear picture of the highly mobile pile of trash, he says.
Over the next 25 years, our understanding of the garbage piles deepened, while some attempted to quantify and clean them up.
But many misconceptions still exist about these buried piles, which few people can reach on their own.
The dimensions of the GPGP are so large that it is often imagined as a land mass.
Study from 2018. predicted that there was at least 1,6 tons of ocean plastic floating in the 79.000 million square kilometer area, a figure that is four to 16 times higher than previously reported.
That's twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.
In 2017, sensational advertising campaign for World Oceans Day, she contributed to this perception, calling on the United Nations to rename the GPGP the Garbage Islands.
The campaign wanted the area to be declared the 196th country in the world, complete with its own flag, passport and currency.
Although this pointed to the world's plastic problem, it only reinforced the myths surrounding the GPGP.
A Google image search still incorrectly shows images of GPGP as a solid mass of plastic, in some cases even appearing solid enough to walk on.
In reality, ships can leave and enter without the mariners even realizing that they are passing through a pile of garbage.
Studies indicate that - although more than 75 percent of the total mass of garbage found in GPGP is waste larger than five centimeters - microplastics make up 94 percent of the estimated 1,8 billion pieces of plastic in the area.
Widespread misconceptions can diminish the urgency of solving the problem of ocean garbage piles.
"The problem is that most people aren't aware of the problem and therefore don't feel motivated enough to get involved in solving it," says Walter Leal, professor of environment and technology at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK.
If this is not addressed, more trash will accumulate in the ocean piles.
"And indeed, they are growing as we speak," says Lil.
One study from 2021 predicts that the growth rate 2,5 percent based on current trends, but the authors of the report warn that this is a conservative estimate.
Ocean plastics generate many environmental risks, from the interference of marine animals such as turtles, to the consumption of birds and fish because they think it is food.
The problem is so widespread that it has led to its creation "plastic spheres" - a term used for ecosystems that have evolved to live in human-made plastic environments.
U recent study, researchers identified 484 invertebrates in about 100 pieces of plastic fished from the GPGP.
Ocean currents have moved some animal species far from their natural habitats to live in the plastic piles, risking unusual mutations or endangering biological life.
Piles of garbage are generated in the high seas - parts of the ocean that lie outside territorial waters - so very few governments take responsibility for them.
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore this problem, says Lil.
On a recent trip to the South Pacific, Lil recalls seeing plastic washing up on the shores of island nations such as Fiji, the Cook Islands and Vanuatu.
"These countries do not produce plastic, but some plastic from the eddy finds its way to the shore. It will also have consequences for tourism," he adds.
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In the absence of government responses, others have set themselves the mission of cleaning up piles of trash.
One of the most famous attempts is The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization founded by Dutch entrepreneur Bojan Slat.
When he was 16, a high school paper on the GPGP coincided with a personal awakening about marine litter.
"I went diving in Greece and saw more plastic bags than fish," says Slat.
He scribbled a drawing on a napkin, which became the basis for his high-tech plan to clean up the GPGP.
Since then, The Ocean Cleanup has raised millions of dollars in investment from donors such as the music band Coldplay and the company Coke.
"The solution is 50 percent hardware and 50 percent software," says Slat.
System 03 - the latest iteration - uses computer modeling to map hotspots of high-density plastic and directs removal technology to them.
A long u-shaped net-like barrier "the length of five school buses" is threaded through piles of garbage from two ships.
The goal is to constantly increase activity and clean 90 percent of plastic from the pile by 2040 - although questioned by some experts the sustainability of this plan, stating that using ships to transport plastic from ocean garbage heaps to ports can have a high carbon cost.
"It's crazy to think that if we didn't do this, this waste would be out there killing marine life. Just imagine if we did it the other way around, how much dissatisfaction it would cause around the world," says Slat.
Whether technology is the answer or not, experts agree that reducing plastic production will be a key push to rein in the piles of trash.
One "good thing about all this," Lil says, is international agreement on plastics.
Under this agreement, 175 countries agreed to a legally binding agreement to prevent new plastics from ending up in the ocean and ending up in landfills.
For Captain Moore, it was high time to reach an agreement to nip plastic in the bud.
"Plastic production is only increasing, which is the opposite of the solution," he says.
"The solution will have to involve reducing the amount of plastic produced."
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