Synthetic sea: We are turning our oceans into a chemical soup - the result being misery and death for billions of organisms, and serious health implications for ourselves
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 30, 2008 at 8:16 amFrom the Permaculture Research Institute:
When we throw things away, we must ask ourselves “where is away?” The clip below [take the link to view it], one of the most frightening I have ever seen, will give you an idea of where at least one of these ‘away’ locations is. Much of our oil-based plastic products end up in our oceans, where they slowly break down into smaller and smaller pieces. Although this may sound like a good thing, in reality all it means is that they are more readily taken up by fish, dolphins, whales, turtles, birds and a myriad other organisms. The plastic molecules never actually disappear. Plastic diminishes in size until in appearance it almost perfectly imitates plankton - resulting in a situation where creatures actually compete with each other to eat it. And, worse, in some parts of the ocean the ratio of plastic to plankton is 6:1, and rising.
Read more of this comprehensive article from the Permaculature Research Institute of the USA by clicking here.
Plastic ocean: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 25, 2008 at 6:10 amFrom BlueFlipper Diving (a scuba diving website):
A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse…
Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
A comprehensive article that gives a lot of background information on plastic. Read more from Blueflipper Diving by clicking here.
Plastic marine debris destined to worsen, says report
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 21, 2008 at 8:12 amFrom the Los Angeles Times:
It’s long been evident to beachcombers after rainstorms, but now it’s official: Marine debris is getting worse.
A panel of scientists took a hard look at the issue and came to the conclusion that the tonnage of plastic and other debris swirling in the sea is likely to increase throughout this century. Its key recommendation: The United States needs to take a leadership role in cleaning up its own act and coaxing other nations to follow.
“Despite all the regulations and limitations over the last 20 years, there are still large quantities of waste and litter in the oceans,” said Keith R. Criddle, a marine policy professor at University of Alaska in Juneau. He was the chairman of a National Research Council committee asked by Congress to assess how well national and international laws are doing to halt the profusion of trash in the oceans. The answer: not very well.
The committee’s 224-page report breaks down the issue and focuses mostly on how to reduce the trash that is dumped intentionally or inadvertently into the ocean from ships and boats. Although this accounts for roughly one-fifth of plastic debris in the ocean, it’s the easiest problem to solve. The rest of the oceanic trash comes from land, blown by the wind or washed off city streets into streams and rivers, then to the sea. The way to halt this steady flow of garbage involves either weaning society’s addiction to the convenience of products made of plastic — which can take decades or centuries to decompose — or changing human behavior on a massive scale.
Read more from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Plastic islands in the sea
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 20, 2008 at 6:48 amFrom the American Chronicle:
While sitting in my dentist´s office last week, I happened to pick up a copy of the October 2007 edition of National Geographic Adventure, ´The Green Edition´. While casually leafing through it I came across an interesting half page article (page 68) concerning plastic islands in the middle of our oceans - floating garbage patches thousands of miles from land covering vast areas.
The subject of the short article was an individual named Charles Moore, a transpacific sailor of note. Moore was and is the Captain of the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita. It seems that Captain Moore was returning from a transpacific race in 1997 to his homeport of Long Beach, California when he noticed an unusual phenomenon – these islands of plastic – in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area commonly referred to as ´the doldrums´.
I had previously come across some information on this unnatural occurrence while doing research for other plastic pollution articles. However, I passed it by as not very reliable. This recent browsing happenstance piqued my imagination in that it was prominently featured in a magazine of impeccable credentials. There had to be something there - something I could sink my teeth into. Not many of us are ocean going sailors who might see this abomination up close as did Captain Moore. But apparently these islands exist - huge mid ocean garbage dumps created by plastic and other waste discarded at sea or washed into it from land, driven by wind and currents to mid ocean where they join up to form this mass of pollution.
Read more from the American Chronicle by clicking here.
A raft made of junk crosses Pacific in 3 months with goal to bring awareness to plastic trash in the ocean
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 28, 2008 at 6:37 am
From the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:
Joel Paschal and Marcus Eriksen nearly encountered numerous hurricanes in their 88 days sailing across the Pacific Ocean aboard the so-called Junk raft to publicize the dangers affecting the oceans. “We have in 50 years turned our ocean into a plastic soup,” said Eriksen, director of research and education for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. “The solution, we think, is to end the age of disposable plastic.”
Curious onlookers gathered on the Ala Wai Boat Harbor docks yesterday to gawk at the unusual sailboat. It was the first time the Junk raft docked since departing from Long Beach, Calif., on June 1. The crew landed on Oahu on Tuesday after anchoring the boat offshore.
The Junk raft, with four sails, is made of garbage. Discarded fishing nets stuffed with 15,000 plastic bottles serve as pontoons, and part of a Cessna 310 airplane is the cabin.
“Plastic, like diamonds, are forever,” said Charles Moore, head of the Algalita. “These are not innocent little bits of confetti; they’re poison pills. They are like sponges for pollutants.” Moore has been collecting data and plastic samples in the North Pacific gyre for years.
Read more from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin by clicking here.
From the Associated Press:
The voyage was part of Algalita Marine Research Foundation’s project called, “JUNK.” The third person of the group, who didn’t make the 2,600 mile trip, was Anna Cummins, Eriksen’s fiancee. Cummins took care of land support, blogs and fundraising. She said the goal of the trip was to creatively raise awareness about plastic debris and pollution in the ocean. Ironically, this was the same goal that Savage had in her trek across the Pacific.
The three want “single-use plastics” to be banned, saying they’re wasteful and usually end up in the ocean. “Recycling is one solution, but it’s just a small part of the puzzle,” Paschal said.
Each day the men posted online videos and blogs of their trip and kept in touch with Cummins. They also spent two to three hours a day maintaining and repairing the raft.
The men said a variety of marine life gathered under the raft throughout the trip. One day, said Paschal, they caught a fish after watching it grow for five weeks. They were going to eat it, but when they cut it open they found its stomach was full of plastic confetti.
Read more from the Associated Press by clicking here.
Plastic debris in the ocean creating waves of disaster
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 15, 2008 at 6:16 amFrom Vancouver’s Straight.com:
They are called lantern fish, silvery navigators of the ocean’s deepest depths, bug-eyed, blunt-nosed, and gap-mouthed, with close-set rows of pointy teeth.
Every night around the globe, at least 600 million tonnes of these finned creatures, along with a few related species—which make up as much as 90 percent of deep-sea fish biomass—swim upward from their dark hiding places to near the ocean’s surface to gorge on zooplankton, made up of organisms that are often too tiny to be seen with the naked eye, such as the shrimplike krill, jellyfish, and arrow worms.
As they forage, the lantern fish, up to 15 centimetres in length when mature, are snapped up by larger marine creatures: seals and whales, squid, and commercial fish like yellowfin tuna, swordfish, mahi-mahi, sharks, and salmon. A handful of commercial fisheries around the world also catch this small delicacy to sell to consumers in Asia and Eastern Europe.
Just a simple fish tale? Unfortunately, no. Rather, it is a tale of environmental and human-health disaster in the making, as the lantern fish’s bounteous numbers give it an importance in the global food chain that far outweighs its diminutive size and prosaic appearance.
For the past half-century, the ocean has been a dumping ground for human detritus, most notably plastic. Nonbiodegradable, plastic doesn’t readily decay and can last upward of 1,000 years. It is made of molecules, called monomers, that are created from petroleum. Linked together to make plastic, monomers become polymers.
When plastic is discarded in the ocean, these polymer chains start to break apart, creating a floating confetti on the surface. These minute red, blue, and clear pills are mistaken by lantern fish for zooplankton, says Charles Moore, founder of the Long Beach, California–based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a private ocean-research organization that is affiliated with the University of California at Irvine and the University of the Pacific in Stockton. In some areas of the ocean, plastic outnumbers surface zooplankton six to one, Moore says.
This is more than unappetizing—it’s poison. Plastic is oil-soluble, and it both absorbs and releases poisons: PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a persistent environmental pollutant; dioxin, a known human carcinogen; and gasoline and other petroleum-based products. These substances end up in the ocean through illegal biochemical- and garbage-dumping (despite international conventions against polluting), oil spills, and sewage and street runoff.
Lantern fish have no “genetic ability to differentiate between zooplankton and plastic”, Moore says. “We have been screwing up the ocean with plastic for 50 to 60 years. The fact that we’ve done it so fast and that it has penetrated so low into the food chain is alarming, but we’re just beginning to make a scientific assessment of what this means.”
Read the rest of this comprehensive article on how discarded plastic in the ocean is affecting marine life from Straight.com by clicking here.
Hidden, a 3.5 Million-ton trash heap lies in the ocean
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on August 6, 2008 at 8:51 pmFrom ABC News:
The world’s largest trash dump doesn’t sit on some barren field outside an urban center. It resides thousands of miles from any land — in the Pacific Ocean. Ocean currents pool large patches of mostly plastic debris in the Pacific. Bottle caps, soap bottles, laundry baskets and shards of plastic are just a few things that float in the ocean’s vastness.
Known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the “dump” is composed mainly of plastic, which isn’t biodegradable. Instead, the plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces in the patch that extends thousands of miles, from California’s coast to China.
Charles Moore, who discovered the trash heap by accident in 1997 when he was sailing the Pacific, collects samples of the growing garbage bin. Some of his samples have contained six times more plastic than plankton. “It is like a minestrone and … a lot of the vegetables are plastic,” said Moore, who stages regular trips to the garbage patch for research.
Read more from ABC News by clicking here.
The largest ‘landfill’ on earth - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 28, 2008 at 6:06 amFrom Digital Journal:
Or you can call it the ‘Plastic Soup’. I bet you haven’t heard about it. The world’s largest junkyard. Also rather ‘infamously’ known as the Pacific Trash Vortex.
The world’s largest landfill is located in the Northern Pacific ocean, in an area of slow moving sea currents called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It is an oceanic desert, its denizens phytoplanktons but scarce other marine life. Far away from the world’s shipping lanes, its chief ‘flora’ is the massive mass of floating detritus. The size of this mass believe it or not equivalent to that of the continental United States.
This huge garbage island is actually two different but linked areas – The Eastern Garbage Patch, is located between Hawaii and California and said to be the size of Texas. The Western Garbage Patch, spreads from the east of Japan to the west of Hawaii.
The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. The patches are a mess and mass of debris and junk, human and otherwise collected from all corners. From discarded electronics, to children toys…it is a profusion of waste. The chief concentration though is as usual - plastic, abundant and unbiodegradable.
To read the rest of this article from Digital Journal by clicking here.
Dan Haifley, Our Ocean Backyard: What can be done about that plastic soup caught in ocean gyres?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 27, 2008 at 7:52 amFrom San Jose Mercury News:
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of two concentrations of mostly plastic garbage caught in swirling ocean gyres between the U.S. and Japan. Similar phenomena exist around the globe. But they aren’t just floating landfills that can be fixed by removing trash. Why?
Plastic does not biodegrade. It undergoes a solar-driven process called photodegradation. The sun breaks down the plastic into smaller pieces called nurdles, which retain the plastic’s polymer structure. So, much of the millions of tons of pollution in these garbage patches consist of ubiquitous nurdles in a watery soup. In the North Pacific gyre, plastics outnumber surface plankton six-to-one, according to Capt. Charles Moore, the leading researcher.
Wallace J. Nichols, senior scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, uses turtles as an example of the effects plastics can have on sea life: “A study in the 1990s in Florida found that of 83 loggerhead turtles that stranded dead, 83.1 percent had ingested plastics and 33.7 percent had ingested tar. Nearly all ingested plastics were consistent with high-density polyethylene that had photodegraded into small shards or that was ingested as spherical precursor pellets.”
Is anyone working to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Howard Wiig, a member of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Marine Debris in Honolulu, told me: “The U.S. Coast guard periodically retrieves large mounds of net, which areshipping hazards. Now we’re asking how we can deal with the North Pacific gyre accumulations before they come ashore.”
Read more from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.
Bobbing in poison soup: Two men set sail to call attention to the 100 million tons of plastic flotsam fouling the world’s oceans
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 30, 2008 at 8:15 amFrom the Los Angeles Times, this article from the opinion pages:
On the first of June, two men and a rabbit set sail from the port of Long Beach, bound for Hawaii, on a raft made of junk. Their cabin is the cockpit of a Cessna 310, white with a blue racing stripe, salvaged from the desert. It floats on a system of handmade pontoons — 15,000 plastic bottles held together with recycled nets — propelled by currents and wind. If it sounds dangerous and makeshift, that’s the point. The pilots of Junk, as the vessel is called, want to get your attention.
They are Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, and Joel Paschal, a former employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The rabbit was abandoned early on — to a safe home, not the depths — after proving a less than seaworthy companion.) Their cause is alerting the world to the fouling of our oceans by plastic debris, and Junk is the poster child ( www.junkraft.com).
Plastic flotsam — 100 million tons of it — already litters the oceans of the world. Another 60 billion tons of plastics will be produced this year alone. A particularly dense accumulation of debris can be found in a holding pattern 1,000 miles off the California coast, in an area known as the central North Pacific gyre, the calm core of a convergence of four major ocean currents rotating clockwise under a large high-pressure zone. What gets in there can be trapped for decades.
The buildup of plastics in the gyre is estimated to span 5 million square miles. That’s the equivalent of the area of the United States — all 50 states — plus India. Some of the debris at the surface floats, some is “neutrally buoyant,” suspended just below the waves, and some hovers even deeper. Some is apparent and recognizable — water bottles, balloons, degraded buoys — but over time, these objects break down into smaller and smaller plastic pieces until they become particulate, invisible to the naked eye. (And small enough to be ingested by fish and filter feeders, as the larger pieces are by birds and turtles.) Also, the central gyre is so vast that even a devastating quantity of visible debris will appear relatively diffuse. There’s no observable “plastic island,” no obvious “garbage patch.”
It is important to note that the source of this plastic garbage and debris are not ocean going vessels, but rather, 80% of it comes from land, such as the trash & debris washed down the Los Angeles River after a rainstorm. Read the rest of this article from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.
Our ocean back yard: Ocean currents carry our waste
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 29, 2008 at 7:37 amFrom the San Jose Mercury News:
Ocean currents carry many things, including those which we choose to toss away. One result is a vast expanse of garbage, caught in gentle waters inside the rotations of ocean currents west of our shores.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the North Pacific Gyre, one of several zones worldwide surrounded by swirling waters driven by weather and the earth’s rotation. Between North America and Japan, the gyre is a 10 million square mile oval where most boaters — some call it the doldrums — won’t go. It’s believed to be a relatively barren area where high-pressure air keeps the slow, deep waters still, with fewer of the bigger fish that need prey more easily found in active waters.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has two parts. The eastern one is north of Hawaii, from 500 nautical miles west of California extending eastward, covering an area twice the size of Texas. The western portion is northwest of Hawaii stretching towards Japan. A thin 6,000-mile current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone — also rich in waste — connects the two. The plastic floating there has decades to last — estimates are that up to 80 percent comes from land. An animation from Greenpeace demonstrating movement of flotsam through the patch over time can be viewed at http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/the-expedition/news/trashing-our-oceans/ocean_pollution_animation.
There may be 100 million tons of materials in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to Algalita Marine Research Foundation founder Capt. Charles Moore. Sailing home to California from a yacht race in Hawaii in 1997, he veered off course through the gyre, finding himself in a large expanse of debris. “I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic,” he says.
Read the rest of this article from the San Jose Mercury News by clicking here.
You can make a difference this week by helping with pollution prevention and cleanup efforts. Click here to visit the Clean Beaches Coalition and schedule your involvement. To find out more about the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, click here.
Junk journey highlights ‘plastic soup’ of Pacific Ocean
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 5, 2008 at 6:27 am
From CNet News:
Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn’t waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.
The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.
To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.
Samples from the trip in February are still being analyzed, but an early test showed 48 parts plastic to each part plankton, a dramatic increase over previous tests:
Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn’t well understood because satellites can’t spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more. “No one really knows what’s out in the other gyres,” Cummins said. “In the north Pacific alone there’s Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members.”
Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.
Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.
The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council. “Recycling isn’t the solution,” Cummins said. “We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic.”
Read more on this story from CNet News by clicking here.
Odds and ends: toll road has some supporters; conserving water by conserving food, the USGS wants YOUR input, raft of junk sets sail for ocean garbage patch, new online water journal, and will California really get a straw in the Columbia River?
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 3, 2008 at 11:04 pmSorry for the super long title folks…
Eight Congressman support building the toll road through San Onofre State Park, according to a blurb in the LA Times: Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar), Ken Calvert (R-Corona), John Campbell (R-Irvine), Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), Darrell Issa (R-Vista), Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) and Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). According to the statement, “the commission failed to recognize years of study for the roadway to protect the environment and valuable state park and coastal resources.” The Department of Commerce recently announced they would be holding public hearings on the appeal sometime later this summer.
Food conservation is also water conservation: (Hat tip to the Water Wired blog!) “Losses of food between the farmer’s field to our dinner table - in food storage, transport, food processing, retail, and in our kitchens are huge. This loss of food is equivalent to a loss in water. Reducing food loss and wastage lessens water needs in agriculture. We need to pay attention to this fact,” says this report from the International Water Management Institute, based in Stockholm. Increasing demand on a limited resource means we need to manage it much more efficiently than what we are doing now. Check out the report by clicking here.
The USGS’s Water for America Initiative seeks stakeholder input in developing a ‘census’ of America’s water resources: According to the website, “In its simplest terms the philosophy of the initiative is “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Knowing our nation’s water “assets” and rates of use on an ongoing basis is crucial to wise management.” Find out more by clicking here to visit the website. Look on the black menu bar for the “Stakeholder Feedback” link for an electronic feedback form that asks for your input on a series of questions. (Also from the Water Wired blog.)
Raft made of junk sails off towards Hawaii to bring attention to the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean: The Emerald City blog covers the launch in this post. You can follow the progress on the Junk Blog - click here. And watch a 4-minute video of the launch in this Emerald City post.
New online free journal on water issues surfaces as promised: From the Water Wired Blog, here’s a link to “Water Alternatives” , an interdisciplinary journal on water, politics and development. Water Alternatives intent is to address “the full range of issues that water raises in contemporary societies. Its ambition is to provide space for alternative and critical thinking on such issues.” Check it out by clicking here.
The Pacific Northwest as a water farm? Yeah, right, says the AquaDoc in this Water Wired post, who says we really don’t know how much water is there: “It’s premature to make such statements, given our lack of knowledge of the volcanic ground water systems in the Cascades. For one thing, it’s more than just a matter of permeability and porosity. We need to know the large-scale storage properties, the recoverability of the ground water, and the effects of withdrawals on hydrologic systems and ecosystems. It’s tempting to say that there is a lot of available ground water beneath the Cascades, but we just don’t know at this point.” Aquadoc also responds to many points in the recent Stockton Record article. Click here for this Water Wired post.
Wow… we’re 0 for 2 now… turned down by the Great Lakes AND the Pacific Northwest…. at least we have the Salton Sea channel….
Earthrace reports on Pacific Ocean garbage dump
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 21, 2008 at 6:05 pm
From Powerboat.com, an interesting, first-person look at the trash swirling around in the Pacific. A group is traveling across the ocean in a biofuel-powered trimaran and they are just coming into the area becoming known as the Pacific Ocean garbage dump. From the post:
‘There’s a lot of crap in the water here’, Adam says, as we dodge around another plastic bottle in the water. Our course is more like a drunken student weaving his way home after a bender, rather than a race boat in a straight line. It seems every hundred metres or so there’s another bit of crap in the water, and anything resembling a buoy (like a plastic bottle), we need to skirt around.
Prof Sharma in Scotland had warned us about this area. Actually so had Bob McDavitt, our forecaster back in New Zealand. It is a giant rubbish dump of plastic and polystyrene, that unbelievably, is the size of Texas, and we’re currently on the southern tip of it.
What actually happens is the current that passes down the West Coast of America picks up rubbish and debris along the Californian coast, and then drags them all the way out here, some thousand odd nautical miles away. The current here then drops under the surface, leaving behind all the rubbish. It joins the giant Californian rubbish dump that remains here year after year, and gradually increases in density as more crap drifts in.
According to the map included with the post, there is an eastern patch closer to Japan as well as the western patch, which is between Hawaii and the west coast. Read more from this Earthrace post from Powerboats.com by clicking here.
Crossing the Pacific on a raft a junk to bring attention to the Pacific Ocean garbage patch
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 20, 2008 at 6:28 amFrom the Emerald City Blog:
The average Emerald City reader has likely heard of the infamous “Pacific Garbage Patch”, that mythical swath of debris in the Pacific, the size of Texas. Or was it two Texases or wait, twice the size of the Moon?
Having recently returned from a month long research trip through this massive marine landfill, I’ll clear up few misconceptions:
• The garbage does indeed exist. HOWEVER it is not a “patch” of garbage, nor a trash island. It’s more like a huge bowl of dilute plastic soup, from California to Japan;
• We can’t clean it up, net it away, or sieve it out. It’s an area twice the size of Texas, and the debris is too spread out. Imagine a handful of plastic cornflakes sprinkled over a football field…. Now imagine 9 million football fields in the Pacific Ocean.
12 years ago, Captain Charles Moore accidentally “discovered” the plastic debris debacle in the North Pacific while sailing an infrequently traveled route from Hawaii to Los Angeles. Stunned by the endless river of plastic junk he found – toothbrushes, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments –- Moore decided to return with research tools and scientific sampling methods, to better understand what he saw.
In 1999, Moore et al. published the groundbreaking study, 4,200 miles across the Pacific, collecting surface samples the entire way.
What we found this year: the problem has gotten much, much worse. Though our samples are still being processed, Captain Moore guestimates a 5-fold increase in ten years, bumping plastic to plankton ratios up to 30:1.
And still, we tear through plastic bags and bottles like they’re going out of style…..
Two researchers will be setting sail on a raft of junk from Long Beach to Hawaii, along with messages in bottles which will eventually be delivered to legislators in DC. The Emerald City blog will be updated on their progress. Check out a picture of the raft (which even includes an old airplane body) and find out how you can add your message in a bottle to the expedition by clicking here.
A sea of synthetic trash; For 60 years, a huge garbage patch has been growing in the Pacific, with deadly consequences for the marine life around it
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 19, 2008 at 5:48 amFrom Canada’s Globe & Mail:
Out in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, hundreds of kilometres from land, Captain Charles Moore stood at the bow of his 50-foot catamaran and looked toward the horizon. But instead of gliding along calm, sapphire-coloured waters glistening in the afternoon sun, his aluminum-hulled Alguita carved through a sea of shiny, modern-day refuse. For days on end, it was plastic, plastic, everywhere.
That was nearly 11 years ago. Capt. Moore was returning to his home in Southern California from a sailing race in Hawaii. With some time to spare that Aug. 3, 1997, he decided to take a slightly longer route home, one that would see him sail through a stretch of ocean historically avoided by even the most weathered sailors. The 26-million-square-kilometre area known as the North Pacific Gyre is essentially free of wind - a kind of ocean desert - and its slow-moving, clockwise vortex of water is nearly impossible to plow through.
What he discovered at the heart of the deep swirls were miles upon miles of water bottles, plastic tarpaulins, dolls and furniture that have been collecting there for as long as 60 years. This plastic soup, with billions of tiny shards of the synthetic material floating just below the surface of the water, is estimated to span an area 1½ times the size of the continental United States.
Alarming new data collected during Capt. Moore’s most recent voyage to the gyre’s centre in February shows the girth of the so-called Eastern Garbage Patch “dramatically increasing.” The United Nations estimates that each square kilometre of ocean carries 13,000 pieces of debris, but this area in the north Pacific has something like 330,000 pieces per square kilometre.
Now, armed with proof that the plastic is making its way into the human food chain, experts warn the existence of the garbage patch and its far-reaching implications could be just as imminent as the worldwide food shortage and the effects of global warming.
What makes plastic so functional - its durability - is precisely what makes it so dangerous. It does not biodegrade, but rather cracks into smaller and smaller pieces as it is exposed to sunlight and thrashing waves.
Greenpeace estimates that one-fifth of the plastic is dumped off ships or accidentally lost off cargo boats (like the container headed to Tacoma, Wash., from Hong Kong in 1992 that spilled about 29,000 rubber ducks overboard, or the 61,000 pairs of Nike shoes that were knocked into the ocean in 1990). The rest comes from land: the Asian Pacific Rim and North America. A plastic bottle discarded on the ground can easily make its way into a municipal water system, which ultimately leads to the ocean, said Capt. Moore, 60, who established the non-profit Algalita Marine Research Foundation.
Read the rest of this comprehensive story from Canada’s Globe and Mail by clicking here.
Extensive video series on the Pacific Garbage Dump; and a trash-eating boat
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 29, 2008 at 2:50 pmI’ve covered the story numerous times about the swirling gyre of trash out there in the southern Pacific Ocean. Curious to know what it looks like? Now, via the Aguanomics blog, here’s an extensive video series on the situation from VBS.TV: Click here.
The New York Harbor gets a lot of trash in it, too. Trash-eating boats hauled in an average of 12 tons a day, according to the watercrunch blog. How do they do that, you ask? Check out video of Marine International’s Trashcat boat on the watercrunch blog by clicking here.
Floating plastic in the Pacific is mistaken for plankton; threatens wildlife
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 10, 2008 at 6:46 amFrom Bloomberg.com:
Marine researchers Charles Moore and Marcus Eriksen surveyed the dark water of the Pacific Ocean aboard a catamaran about 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) north of Hawaii in January and found trash everywhere.
They were in the eye of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, where opposing ocean currents form a vortex bigger than Australia, trapping tons of floating debris in its circular flow. Trash that wound up there used to decompose. Now, with 403 billion pounds of plastic produced annually, according to the Houston-based consulting group Chemical Markets Associates Inc., areas of the gyre have turned into a soup of indigestible shards that can break down to the size of plankton and be mistaken for food, endangering millions of fish and birds. “No matter where we go, we find plastic,” said Moore, 60. “The ocean is now this plastic soup, and we just don’t know what that’s doing.”
Marine debris worldwide kills more than 1 million sea birds and 100,000 mammals each year, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The chemical-laden materials have been found in the stomachs of dead fish and birds. “We know that these plastics can carry high levels of toxins that they collect as they float,” said Eriksen, 40, an oceanographer with Moore at the nonprofit Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, California. “The next step is to see if it bio-accumulates up the food chain onto your dinner plate.”
No clean-up efforts are under way, according to the NOAA and researchers. Moore and Eriksen said such an endeavor wouldn’t be feasible because of the distance from land. The oceanographic agency has focused on removing derelict fishing gear threatening marine mammals and corals. The plastic industry is funding litter-reduction efforts.
Read the rest of this story from Bloomberg.com by clicking here.
Plastic waste turning Pacific Ocean into a garbage dump
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 26, 2008 at 5:30 amFrom Nature News:
A swirling, floating garbage dump in the North Pacific Ocean twice the size of the United States has been noticed in recent years and is growing at a swift pace. It is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten unless the use of disposable plastics is reduced.
While this “trash continent” is not thick enough to be walked on, from the ocean surface to a depth of 30 feet, the plastic is floating at a concentration six times that of its neighboring zooplankton, the most abundant animal type of life both by number and total weight. The plastic can reach concentrations of a million pieces per square mile.
Most of this plastic debris originates from land as trash, being swept out by rivers or the tide. About one fifth comes from ships’ cargo and oil platforms. Toothbrushes, cigarette lighters and syringes have accumulated here and everything from Nike sneakers to plastic yellow ducks has been lost from cargo ships.
Due to undesirable wind patterns, most sailors have avoided this area and a natural lack of nutrients in this ocean region has given fishermen reason to look for fish elsewhere. The translucent quality of the plastic just below the water’s surface prevents satellites from detecting it. These two factors have prevented the sheer vastness of the garbage accumulation from being noticed until recently.
Read the rest of this story from Nature News by clicking here.
No tech solution for plastic garbage patch: “We’re damned to a future of pollution by plastic”, says Moore
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on March 6, 2008 at 7:32 amFrom Cnet News:
Plastic contamination in the world’s oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton.
“We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic,” said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. “There’s no evidence it will end in a millennium.”
A plastic “graveyard” double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii. There, his crew had found in the water six parts of plastic for every part plankton, with a fivefold increase in the amount of plastic between 1997 and 2007.
But their latest voyage found the pollution even thicker in the “highway” of ocean leading to the great Garbage Patch, according to Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. Moore said that area comprises 2.5 million square miles. In the Pacific alone, heavily polluted plastic zones amount to the size of the continent of Africa, Moore estimated.
Bobbing in the waters, especially closer to shore, are leftovers of everyday consumer products: plastic bags, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, bottles and their caps, toys, and fast food wrappers. “We found a video camera case that was clean enough that you could put a video camera in it, but it was starting to get covered in barnacles,” he said.
Eighty percent of garbage within waterways, most of it plastic, begins its journey on land rather than coming from boats, according to Algalita and the California Coastal Commission. Toxic plastic kills wildlife, poisons seafood, and could even exacerbate global warming. Stories abound of the bellies of birds and sea creatures stuffed with colorful plastic caps and wrappers mistaken for food.
On their latest trip, Moore’s crew was shocked to find that plastic could be creating new habitats. Hungry gulls are traveling far from home into the ocean to feast upon barnacles and crabs attached to plastic debris.
Although there’s no solid data about how much plastic birds and fish are eating, plastic in seafood is likely harmful for people to eat, as are better-understood toxic metals such as mercury. Plastic acts like a sponge for poisons such as PCBs, concentrating them at levels a million times higher than in seawater.
Get the rest of the story from Cnet news by clicking here. There’s even a picture of the “plastic soup” that is floating around. I would have pasted it over, but it looks pretty gross.