The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was first discovered in the late 1990s by oceanographer Charles J Moore, who on returning to southern California after a sailing race, saw an enormous stretch of floating debris, despite being hundreds of miles from land. Although Moore is known for drawing attention to this phenomenon, the expression garbage patch was in fact the coinage of one of his oceanographer colleagues, Curtis Ebbesmeyer. The phrase caught on and is now used as a generic reference to any extensive area of marine debris.