Water: Shock at Sea

When the Norwegian author-explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed across half the Pacific on a balsawood raft 22 years ago, he recalls, “We on Kon Tiki were thrilled by the beauty and purity of the ocean.” During his recent attempt to sail from Africa to Central America in a boat made of papyrus reeds, which he was forced to abandon last month 600 miles from his goal, Heyerdahl’s old thrill was replaced by shock. In Manhattan last week, he reported to the Norwegian Mission at the United Nations: “Large surface areas in mid-ocean as well as nearer the continental shores on both sides were visibly polluted by human activity.”

Heyerdahl and his six-man crew were astonished and depressed by the quantity of jetsam bobbing hundreds of miles from land. Almost every day, plastic bottles, squeeze tubes and other signs of industrial civilization floated by the expedition’s leaky boat. What most appalled Heyerdahl were sheets of “pelagic particles.” At first he assumed that his craft was in the wake of an oil tanker that had just cleaned its tanks. But on five occasions he ran into the same substances covering the water so thickly, he told TIME Researcher Nancy Williams, that “it was unpleasant to dip our toothbrushes into the sea. Once the water was too dirty to wash our dishes in.”

The particles, some of which Heyerdahl collected for later analysis, are roughly the size of a pea. Oily and sometimes encrusted with tiny barnacles, they smell like a combination of putrefying fish and raw sewage. Heyerdahl hopes that his experience will stir the U.N. to propose new international regulations to keep the oceans clean. “Modern man seems to believe that he can get everything he needs from the corner drugstore,” says the explorer. “He doesn’t understand that everything has a source in the land or sea, and that he must respect those sources. If the indiscriminate pollution continues, we will be sawing off the branch we are sitting on.”