Oceanographers are urging more research on a mariner's discovery of a giant "raft" of plastic debris concentrated in an area covering more than 2.5 Million square kilometers of the South Pacific.

Garbage patches are known in the Indian and northern Pacific Oceans.  Captain Charles Moore should know, he was part of the team that discovered the patch north of the Equator in 1995.  Now, he says he has located a big one in the area around Easter Island and Robinson Crusoe Island west of the coast of Chile.

Moore founded the non-profit Algalita Marine Research organization aiming to combat the "plastic plague" of garbage floating in the world's oceans.  His ships travel the globe to drag nets through known garbage patches to collect plastic particles from the ocean.  The waste is documented and the data is fed into estimates of global microplastic distribution.

The captain says the South Pacific garbage patch is different from those in the Northern Hemisphere, because most of the trash appears to have come from the fishing industry.