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Expedition To Explore an Alaska-Sized Plastic "Island"
Peace Corps Online writes "An expedition called Project Kaisei has departed bound for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge 'island' of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean estimated to be the size of Alaska (some estimates place it at ten times that size). The expedition will study the impact of the waste on marine life, and research methods to clean up the vast human-created mess in the Pacific. The BBC quotes Ryan Yerkey, the project's chief of operations: 'Every piece of trash that is left on a beach or ends up in our rivers or estuaries and washes out to the sea is an addition to the problem, so we need people to be the solution.' The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre, a remote area commonly referred to as the horse latitudes. The rotational pattern created by the North Pacific Gyre draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. 'You are talking about quite a bit of marine debris but it's not a solid mass,' says Yerkey. 'Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash. We need to get it out but we need to also have people make those changes in their lives to stop the problem from growing and hopefully reverse the course.'"
If you wanted to do that, pretty much any municipal solid waste dump would be a better bet. This is more like a gigantic patch of watery plastic soup(plus, it's in the middle of the pacific, transport costs would be irksome), dense enough to cause all kinds of trouble for aquatic fauna, tenuous enough to make collection a serious hassle.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/071102-micro-plastics.html
"...The seas eventually break down all this plastic garbage into microscopic particles. ...
adding just a few millionths of a gram of contaminated microplastics to sediments triggered an 80 percent rise in phenanthrene accumulation in marine worms dwelling in that muck.
Such worms lie at the base of the food chain,..."
The overwhelming majority of the "patch" is invisible, composed of very tiny particles the size of plankton. It turns out plastic actually can degrade over time -- not biodegrade, but photodegrade. When plastic floating in the ocean is bombarded with sunlight, it breaks down into smaller and smaller particles, which is what most of this garbage patch currently consists of.
I have to wonder if the "sponge effect" of the patch -- the way it absorbs high concentrations of DDT and other chemical threats to marine life -- is necessarily bad; perhaps if the patch can be removed, scrubbed, and reinserted, the levels of these chemicals in ocean waters could be lowered.
Palm trees and 8
Are you on crack, oh wait no you're just a troll. Do a youtube search for Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there is actual video of this stuff, the amount of area this covers is scary as shit, and even worse, the shots of cut open fish with their stomachs filled with small bits of plastic freaked the crap out of me.
But hey fuck it, it's just hysterics, lets keep dumping garbage into our oceans, there's nothing wrong with that.
We (humans) caused that huge mass of plastic to form in the sea by dumping our garbage in the beach or sea and in my opinion we should also try to get it out, or at least stop in from increasing in size. The problem with modern Western society is that we are not ready to start a long term project like that unless it is profitable for us in short term. And that is something that it isn't. It would be a long term money sink with no real market value, and thats why not many seems to care. In a way it feels like we are crapping our own pants because we have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
Algalita Marine Research Foundation have been studying this garbage patch in the Pacific for the last 10 years.
http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html Interesting stuff in here. Also good to show people who think that humans can't possibly have an "impact" on the biosphere. I can't add much to what's already in this talk...go take a peek.
As other people have pointed out, you cant pick it up on satellite.
Fortunately, some nice fellows have gone out there on boat and looked around. A quick search on youtube will get you a lot of videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnUjTHB1lvM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxNqzAHGXvs&feature=related
for example.
Some dude went out from Hawaii on a raft made out of recycled plastic bottles, and kept a blog, there's some nice photos of what they found. http://junkraft.blogspot.com
They pulled some water samples out of the water, and frankly, they look like utter shit.
Nature is not exclusively 'red in tooth and claw.' Cooperation is at least as much a part of ecology as competition. Cooperators are simply more likely to survive than pure competitors. Every creature on Earth evolved from the same thing, and uses the same building blocks. Like cells in your body, nothing can live on its own. Everywhere you look you will see altruism and cooperation in nature, as well as violent competition. However, all this is beside the point.
Your argument boils down to a classic naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is a certain way does not mean that is how it should be, or how it must be. We have brains. We aren't simple animals. We can predict the consequences of our actions and adjust our actions accordingly. Another point to consider is that we are not desperate. We are not being chased by a lion. We have enough resources to give everyone on the planet a decent standard of living. When you look at history, resource depletion is one of the primary factors in culture collapse. Some cultures have learned from this and developed sustainable ways of living. Ultimately, those are the cultures with the best long term chance of survival.
Finally, we can punish non-cooperation, making it less profitable than cooperation. Pollution is only potentially profitable to you if your neighbors won't come over and put a stop to your activities. We can change the risk/reward ratio for any activity individuals or groups engage in, whether they like it or not.
In closing, let me just add that I'm glad I don't live in your mental world. It sounds like a lonely and frightening place.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton