If it floated to shore that would be a good thing. It would raise people's awareness and it could be dealt with relative ease. Same as to the floating stuff. It is easier to reach than the gunk that hangs halfway down. It is harder for the sea animals to determine what it is before ingesting or becoming ensnared. The toxic crap is really frightening. There is little or nothing you can do about it. At the top of my list of the MOST obnoxious pollutants are the hundred mile long trawling nets that have been lost or cast off for some reason from those floating fish processing plants. A very large proportion of them come from Japan. That type of industry needs to be STOPPED. PERIOD! They're not just fishing our oceans to death but the fallout of overboard waste is killing everything else! We do NOTHING! as a nation, as the great world power, to stop this travesty!

There is a point in scenarios like this where a critical mass is reached. It can be illustrated thus: Imagine a pond that has been invaded by a water plant that, if left unchecked will smother the pond. The plant doubles is size each day. Well the pond's owner eventually becomes aware of the noxious weed's presence but he thinks, "It just a tiny bit. I'll take care of it later." This goes on for several days. He has other more pressing issues. One day he sees the pond is about half covered by the weed and he thinks to himself, "I will take care of this first thing in the morning!" But when he wakes the pond is dead!

No one knows where the critical mass point is in our oceans but there IS such a point and when the cascade of extinction and whatever biology will replace it, (if any) begins, there truly will be nothing we can do EVER. And it could even mean the extinction of our species.

Remember that at one time the atmosphere of Earth was NOT oxygen bearing. The earliest organisms were fat and happy and THEIR waste was oxygen! It accumulated in the atmosphere but, ah, so what? That was a wholly different "ocean" to these little critters. They had no intelligence so how could they know? Eventually they all smothered, were poisoned by the oxygen and they ALL died out. Lucky us! That ensured that OUR life forms could evolve! Aren't you glad that WE have intelligence? If something like that began to happen here in our world we would do something to stop it! Wouldn't we?