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Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers
NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash.
"The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."
The mass production of plastics didn't take off until about the 1950s. What we're looking at is approximately 60 years worth of garbage. The pile they have looked at is approximately twice the size of Texas. If that doesn't seem large now, then it certainly will in another fifty years if we continue to discard plastics at our current rates. I suspect that you'd find that our use of plastic has curved upward sine the 50s, rather than remaining at a constant rate... so I think that hoping for an island only four times the size of texas by 2050 would be optimistic.
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
Problem: Overfishing
Problem: Garbage in the water
Solution: Pay fisherman to catch garbage
Why not pay some of those Japanese whaling factory ships with their big front loading dock doors and all those impoverished fishing crews to go and net this crud out of the water... keeps an industry running, saves some whales, helps a bit of fish restocking and cleans up the planet a bit... I'm sure they can find some bailout budget left to help out Can't hurt to try.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Somebody has not taken his lessons from playing Civilization...
Ezekiel 23:20
Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?
Well, because it's been broken down to the molecular level. It'd float right through a net. What's needed is a troller that can suck up the first several inches of water, remove the plastic particles, and then discard the water. Unfortunately, even something with the capacity of a supertanker would take decades of 24/7 operation to make much progress -- Because once you collect it, you gotta transport it somewhere else.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And where do you put it? It was dumped in the Ocean for a reason, because it was not convenient or possible to dump it anywhere else. Did you read the size of the garbage patch? Would you want that in your back yard? The point is that we are making too much garbage! Any 5 year old can tell you that's the real issue.
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical that global warming trends we've seen are the result of our fossil fuel usage. If you follow the money, there are a lot of people in the environmental movement pushing "carbon credits", and are poised to make a boatload of money by exploiting others' guilt, while doing nothing to actually solve real problems. But no one wants dirty air or water. There are plenty of good reasons why we should be reducing our oil and gas dependency (just inhale deeply on a bad smog day if you live in LA). And one would be an idiot to argue that a bunch of plastic in the ocean (or other obviously man-made debris or pollutants) are anything but a problem caused by humans, and needs to be solved by humans.
Believe it or not, I consider myself an environmentalist. When I was a bit younger, I did a lot of hiking in the mountain ranges near my home. I think nature is something that needs to be carefully protected, because it's far to easy to trample it under the foot of progress and industry. I support our national park system, and conversation efforts everywhere. I'm switching my light bulbs to more efficient halogens as they need replacing (not by force of law, though!). I'll be replacing my gas-burning car with an electric when they come out with a practical, affordable model, and I'm looking forward to doing so.
However, I also believe that we can strike a balance between responsible stewardship, individual liberty, and capitalist enterprise. I just happen to believe that you need to be extremely judicious in applying the force of law to every problem you need to solve. Growing the power of government nearly always comes at the expense of individual liberty, so I prefer that not be our first solution, but the last.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It should be noted, for the record, that there are strong libertarian grounds for action on pollution(for that matter, much stronger action on pollution than we presently have). If a compound or compounds that you emit during the course of your activities damages my health or my property, it is subtler, but not ethically different, than any other means of you harming me or my property without my consent.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is no more "available" or "preserved" as petroleum than is the portion we are turning into carbon dioxide and water by burning it; conversely, the latter is no more "gone" than the former.
Insofar as that "petroleum" remains usable at all (e.g., as potentially recyclable plastic), it would be much better preserved simply by recycling it as plastic, rather than mixing it with garbage and putting it in landfills or dumping it into the ocean.
Good.
You know, it kinds of sends mixed messages when you first admit that you haven't thought through the issue very much, and then go on and preemptively characterize any criticism as being based on your critics' "religion".
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
The ocean might seem "all one kind of place" to you, but it isn't to the creatures who live there. If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food. And that means its where important sea life congregates.
N.B.: I'm no oceanographer, so some of this is reasoned out from first principles, and there's some extrapolation. But this is more comparable to building a polluting factory in the middle of a rich food producing area (like, say, the Santa Clara Valley) than to building the same factory in the middle of the Sahara desert. And, yes, we were that stupid. We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land. This is doing the same stupid thing again, with even less intentionality behind it than is usual.
For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.