I DON'T KNOW what it says about our nation when you could ask people to name their favorite living marine biologist -- Jacques Cousteau is dead, mind you -- and the most likely answer is George Costanza, the hopelessly neurotic fictional character from "Seinfeld" who, as you may recall, only wanted to pretend to be a marine biologist.

I am about to rectify that.

Here in Manchester, we can lay claim to Miriam Goldstein, a real-life marine biologist and a 1999 Central High School graduate who is engaged in a remarkable research project that may help save the seven seas.

You see, about a thousand miles off the coast of California, there is something known as the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. (The word "gyre" -- pronounced JY-er -- comes from the Latin "gyrus," meaning a spiral or a vortex.)

That vast, swirling stretch of ocean contains one of the oldest and largest ecosystems on earth, but it has also become home to a striking accumulation of plastic trash. That trash accumulation is so great it even has a name -- it's called "The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch" -- and it has the potential to dramatically damage marine life and alter the biological environment.

In an effort to get a better handle on the problem, Miriam Goldstein spent most August out on the Pacific Ocean on board a research vessel called New Horizon.

She was out there as the principal investigator for a mission run under the auspices of the University of California at San Diego, where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in marine biology. The mission was known as SEAPLEX. That's an acronym for the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition.

"As the problem has drawn more and more public attention," Miriam said, "I've had people tell me, I looked on Google Earth and I couldn't find a garbage patch,' but it's not like it's an island or a continent.

"It's like a dilute soup," she explained. "Eighty to 90 percent of the plastic particles are a couple of millimeters in width -- that's less than one of your fingernails --"" so even when you're close, it looks like beautiful cerulean ocean, but then you bring up your nets and ..."

And you see the indelible fingerprints of man on nature.

"That's why I think there's something more emotional and deeper going on here to generate such strong public interest," she explained in a passionate posting on her blog while she was out at sea.

"People want to know that there are wildernesses out there somewhere," she said, "and if the open sea is no longer a wilderness, what is?"

It's a question that her father, David Goldstein, is proud to see her exploring. Certainly the same can be said for influential teachers from her days at Central High, teachers like Nick Covatis and Selma Naccach-Hoff.

"It was because of Mrs. Naccach-Hoff that I first majored in English when I was an undergraduate at Brown University," Miriam said, "but then I took a summer work-study job in the marine biology lab and I was hooked.

"When I'd had Mr. Covatis for anatomy and physiology at Central, I knew he'd been a marine biology major at UNH so we were always talking about these cool little marine critters. I had also done a summer program at UNH for math and science, so the underlying interest was always there. It just took that work-study job to get me hooked again."

But she didn't use hooks to bring in samples from the sea.

For instance, researchers on board the New Horizon employed a device called an "Oozeki Trawl." One day, it netted them a "Pearleye," a predatory mid-water fish with eyes that look upward so it can see prey swimming above.

Before long, they didn't need the trawling devices.

"Though we'd been pulling up plastic in our nets for days, seeing it freely floating about, not bunched up in a net, was shocking," Miriam wrote on her blog. "The magnitude of the problem suddenly came crashing down on me. How could there be this much plastic just floating in a random patch of ocean a thousand miles from land?"

She still has more questions than answers, but she returned with about 150 sample jars from her August voyage. For the next year or so, the contents of those jars will be the focus of her continuing doctoral studies.

"When I was growing up near the Gulf of Maine, my parents cautioned us to never turn our backs to the ocean," she said. "The ocean is the cradle of life on earth, filled with infinite variability, and we've only explored a tiny fraction of it. There are so many mysteries to explain, so many depths to plumb ..."

All the better that we have brilliant scientists like Miriam to explore them.

John Clayton is the author of several books on Manchester and New Hampshire, including his newest title, "Remembering Manchester." His e-mail is jclayton@unionleader.com.