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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."
Is it full of garbage patch dolls?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This story remind me of the George Carlin bit on the environment:
AccountKiller
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.
Famous last words before being eaten by Cthulhu.
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.
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.
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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?
Researchers (and sci-fi writers) always talk about things like gigantic space elevators and star-encompassing spheres; works that would take an entire world's focus (and several generations of dedicated work) to accomplish. I always figured that those were unaccomplishable dreams...
But then I read this story and got to thinking... Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?
present day... present time... hahahaha...
The "pile" isn't. Most of the plastic is microscopic bits of plastic floating under the surface. That's why they're wondering about plankton and trying to convert it into diesel fuel. Those few pieces of plastic they found on the surface is all that found to photograph that day. If you sail down there bring a microscope.
Don't mess with plastic Texas!
The gyres (e.g., the Sargasso Sea) are where most of the nutrient transition from plankton to the rest of the food chain happens. It is a big deal, and you obviously don't know the first thing about oceanic life.
The vast, vast majority of the trash contained in this "garbage patch" is composed of particulates far too small for the eye to see, suspended below the surface. Cleaning it up would require a large number of autonomous floating machines with, essentially, portable water treatment plants on board. All of these suggestions about fishing boats running around and scooping up plastic bottles out of the ocean is complete nonsense.
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
The 'plastic' waste modern man produced could be seen as a resource storage.
We're burning up a lot of the petroleum resources. Which means it goes away. Gone, not available in the future.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is being preserved in that form. A century from now people might be saying 'thank goodness they saved SOME of the petroleum in the form of all that plastic in the landfills and floating in that big mass on the ocean.' And then they may go on to curse the 'environmentalists' who forced industry to stop using plastic bags and containers. All the 'biodegradable' packaging just crumbled away.
Not saying this is a completely thought out notion, but it makes some sense.
Tear into it if it conflicts with your religion.
Somebody has not taken his lessons from playing Civilization...
Ezekiel 23:20
It seems to me that Pacific island nations with very low labor costs, high unemployment and a long tradition of seafaring should be able to find an economical way to round up that trash and recycle it for money.
--
make install -not war
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.
This is why I only buy family-size cheetos, unlike those selfish bastards that buy lunch-size packets.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
I would bet you are right, but there are big masses out there as well. I have personal experience with this. My wife and I were sitting on the beach of the big island of Hawaii and this mass drifted in. I was told it wasn't the first time. Some guys had to cut the thing in half and then use a tractor to drag it away in pieces. I also noticed that it was something of a mini-ecosystem with crabs and flies and such crawling all over it.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The "twice the size of Texas" figure is the lower-bound, conservative estimate. According to Wikipedia, the patch is estimated to be between 0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Also, the reason that this patch exists in the first place is because the North Pacific Gyre acts to collect debris (both biological and man-made) from around the entire Ocean. While still a relatively small area in size, it is incredibly important to the overall food chain due to the abundance of organisms sustained by the biomass collected by these currents.
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.
Yeah and they really stood the test of time.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
"Does eating plastic poison plankton?" Of course it does. That is how Sponge Bob and Mr. Krab planned it. They released plasic waste into the oceans to eliminate their competition, Plankton, owner of the Chum Bucket.
You mean worse than oh say, FISHING?
Seriously, filtering the top 6 inches of water, even going so far as to remove anything bigger than .5 micron shouldn't be such an impossible task, I'm envisioning a boat with a wide modified bow that collects the bow wave for filtering.. perhaps a group of them in an arrow formation filtering thier way back and forth across the gyre. Heck done right they could burn the plastic as fuel, capture the co2 in the sea water to help the phytoplankton recover.
As to to the depletion of the microorganisms in that layer, if the plastic is THAT deleterious we are likely doing the species(s) a favor by removing the badly damaged members, freeing up the space for healthier members to reproduce.
If you burn the plastic and debris at a high temperature the emissions are relatively small. Burn it and put the exhaust through another filter to catch whats left. Hell you could probably power the ship from the incinerators.
Too bad plastic is cheaper to make than it is to reclaim. Otherwise someone would have scooped it all up and made it into milk jugs by now.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So garbage is not randomly distributed throughout the oceans, but not surprisingly, it collects in areas of significantly increased density due to prevailing currents. How dense? Not dense enough to be visible to the casual onlooker. Only dense enough to be identified through careful study. So is that the story here?
No. The truth isn't good enough for a story. The truth isn't good enough to drive political action. So "scientists" lend their names to "authoritative" agencies like NOAA to come up with the story of a 1,700 mile "patch" of garbage. Alternatively (and dramatically), it has been called a "flotilla".
Yes, there's "a lot" of garbage in the ocean. And, it's a "big" ocean. Look carefully and you'll see that these stories don't do much to help you gauge what this "patch" really is.
"It's pretty shocking," said Miriam Goldstein.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet.
Thank you, researchers Goldstein and Hayment, for your contributions.
Look carefully through the photographs surrounding this story. Look for the 1,700 mile flotilla of garbage. By my understanding, this thing is a whole lot less dense than the stories would have you believe.
Here's a good one that I tried to track down:
This little "factoid" apparently comes from a non-peer-reviewed paper (page 270 here) published in 1985 that cites another un-reviewed paper in 1984 (can't find this one...Fowler) that estimated that 50,000 seals had died that year due to "entanglement" primarily in nets, as best I can tell. There's no more on methodology for determining that number, nor how it should be related to overall mammal population and more general "ocean debris."
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
There are two things that make this difficult. The amount of garbage is the size of Texas and a lot of the plastics have dissolved.
A crew went to the gyre and recorded a documentary (a free documentary by VBS.TV Garbage Island ), hoping to see giant island of garbage. While they did not see the island, what they saw was far worse. The plastics have dissolved and estimated that the amount of dissolved plastics is higher than the microscopic sea life and natural oceanic nutrients in the water. The gyre is now very, very gross. The garbage is either so scattered or very well dissolved that there is no way that it can be cleansed that easily.
What could possibly go wrong? ?
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
Don't be such an idiot. Garbage is buried in most places. No one is saying that dumping in an ocean is acceptable.
I can't give you pictures of the entire gyre, but there are several taken during the March 2008 DXpedition to Clipperton Island, a small (9 square kilometers, 3.5 square miles), uninhabited (and rarely visited) island in the North Pacific about 1100 km (700 mi) off the coast of Mexico.
Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here, here, and here). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog,
Most of their outdoor photos have plastic trash in them.
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.
Because you insult those that disagree with you by implying that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
Also, if he had just posted that I probably wouldn't have respected his comment. Granted, there probably are scammers among the carbon credit sellers. However, if you buy up some land and plant an orchard, that's a legitimate carbon sink (the trees themselves) which will also turn a profit.
I trust that sort of thing a lot more than the average venture capitalist. But that's why, if I were to buy a carbon credit, I would do something along the lines of finding a golf course and turning it into an orchard, or just a forest.
And I don't think than many environmentalists are honestly arguing that carbon credits are a solution. Environmentalism boils down to reduce, reuse, recycle. Corporations can take their greenwashed overconsumption and shove it up my ass.
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say in cleaning up fresh water sources better, or to be part of waste water treatment plants. We already have filtration systems for this or that, but to develop something that could work on that sort of scale could very well be some important tech down the road. And like was pointed out, being plastic, this could help develop interest in larger scale energy plants that could use the stuff, including th..terraforming isn't the word, aquaforming? Huge floating energy conversion barges. Or just concentrate it back down so it could be used for..manufactured plastic goods. I don't see the need for plastics going away anytime soon, nor the need for more forms of energy. And we need *work* for millions and millions more people planet wide every year, something useful.
A lot of times I think we humans might be better off just with a 180 attitude adjustment, instead of always looking at things as problems, if we just looked at them as opportunities, it might make solutions appear easier and work better. The old saw of how to look at things, the glass half full or half empty deal. Turn the "Oh, noes!!" into the "Hot Damn!"s.
Recycling is a joke. 90% of what consumers pretend they are "recycling" today is dumped as garbage in a landfill - mostly because of cross-contamination and other process problems.
Sure, we could be recycling plastic containers into ... ??? ... well, you see that is the problem. Nobody really has a need for garbage-grade plastic today. And when you combine 17 sorts of plastic formulations into a big hopper that is what you get. There are few, if any, practical uses for the material and nobody is interested in paying what it would really cost to do things like intelligent separation.
Practical recycliing happens for pre-consumer paper and post-consumer glass and aluminum. Post-consumer paper is pretty much just garbage today because of the costs and other problems, contamination being one of them.
For everything else, from electronics to plastic containers, recycling is a hoax put over on people. The materials are taken off to the recycling center where they are carefully examined and then trashed. Nobody wants it, nobody is going to pay extra for recycling and nobody wants to pay for manual labor to really separate the different sorts of materials.
I did put some effort into understanding NOAA's role in this campaign, and apparently, a good deal more than you did. See NOAA here where the agency explains how it got from the "50,000 to 90,000" quote to their "100,000" propaganda number. Interestingly, if you had indeed taken the time to do exactly as you suggested, i.e. to google "NOAAA 100000", you would have seen this reference as the third link down. I took a much lengthier route, not looking to prove or disprove anything, but simply to understand the basis of the 100,000 estimate.
As NOAA's explanation indicates, they took the only loosely related range of "50,000 to 90,000", and from there, the 100,000 number emerges without further explanation. Your metaphorical characterization exactly matches my thinking when I saw it: they pulled it out of their asses.
I have high regard for the scientists of NOAA and their work products. I say this with great sincerity, and not to patronize your point. But in stark contrast with the genuinely authoritative works of NOAA, there are the political ways in which Presidential administrations and non-scientifically motivated high-level administrators of NOAA use its good name to advance political positions. In doing so, they besmirch NOAA's well-deserved reputation for good science, and cause people like me to use quotes around the word "authoritative" when describing the agency's "work" such as this. The politicians are simply taking NOAA's well-earned trust for a lowly political joy ride.
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable. If this ocean debris campaign is any indication of the Obama administration's approach, it looks like they will be using the NOAA moniker to publish political opinions as if they are the science of NOAA. This latter approach will be much more damaging to NOAA's scientists; it blatantly misrepresents their voices instead of just making it more difficult for them to be heard.
It is a *translucent* layer of material. That is why it could not be picked up by the satellite imagery, besides being of microscopic proportions individually.
This is one of the very few places of distant observations where our advances in technology cannot make up for the loss of *in situ* research, a bit like the HUMINT gaffe and shortage of CIA in the middle east.
Also - a typical example of the proverb about the fallen tree, not reported by the media. When it gets to the point to be reportable and visible from space - it would have been already way too late...
It was accidentally stumbled upon by a strained sailboat, thus the skipper was close enough and slow in the water to take notice and that's how it all started.
There are a couple of movies on the subject, shot on location and the result and the impact from them make all the difference.
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
Sure, should be no problem building something that can filter out a mass of pollution LARGER THAN TEXAS.
How long do you think that would take exactly? How much energy would that take? How are you going to transport the debris that is collected? Where are you going to put it? Is the solution more "green" than the problem?
This is a repeat thread with the same recommended, knee jerk solutions.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Wow I know no one bothers to rtfa, but not even bothering to read the post you are replying to?
Nice, you've taken slashdot to a new level, congratulations.
This is an engineering problem, not a religious war. It has a solution but being a naysayer isn't part of it.
How long?
It took us what 60 years to cause the problem so it so anything less than that is a win, wouldn't you think?
Ok then,
Older Big ships run on steam. Water dosen't care what makes it boil.
That takes care of part of the energy requirements (depending on how dense the usable plastic is) and takes care of 93%ish of the bulk of the waste.
The CO2 capture is not all that tricky considering that the ships will be pretty big, bubble the exhaust thru some seawater and flow it across the decks in the sun, phytoplankton turn it into more plankton which we then use to re-seed the "cleaned" areas.
More green? you are going to have to very carefully define exactly what "more green" means. .01 % of the surface of the oceans, those creatures exist to reproduce and should manage to repopulate those areas just fine.
I'm pretty sure that we can figure out how to get the plastic out of the water. Yes it will probably kill countless billions of tiny tiny little sea creatures. Fortunately we are still talking about a good deal less than
Just how important is getting the plastic out of the water or conversely, just how bad is the plastic for the local environment?
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Whether or not global warming exists isn't a liberal or conservative issue, it is a scientific issue, and one that has not been conclusively resolved.
The opening statement of your comment illustrates the entire problem in the US. The liberals have latched onto global warming as being humanity's Deathstar. The conservatives don't buy it. Your opinion is governed by your political orientation. Neither side is considering the issue from an impartial (much less a scientific) perspective and every corporation is trying to profit from it.
It's turned into one of those hot button topics like gay marriage and abortion... every uninformed retard is now going to have an opinion based solely on their political stance, science be damned. It's sad that most Americans don't possess the intellect or follow through to attempt to understand the science for themselves, nor do they possess the BS filters to understand when their politicians are manipulating them for political or financial gain, but they will spend hours of effort researching the best TV set and car to buy.
dude, fuck off.
or in other words, I'll take the word of an actual scientist at one of the US's finest oceanographic research institutes, with a professional reputation to protect, over some random /.ers political hunch.
signed, your friendly neighborhood oceanographer who has seen these garbage slicks mid-ocean with his own eyes. Yes, much of the plastic is still in visible chunks. It's disgusting. The non-visible stuff is measured by concentrated by plankton accumulating nets which record the volume of water passing through them allowing density calculations.
I'd like to know what alternative you propose as the cause of global warming.
I propose the Sun
Carbon seems the most likely suspect in the global warming game.
I suspect it's the Sun
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I just read Beyond Developmentality, a fascinating book on this subject. Quoting from the blurb:
The author, Dr.Debal Deb, is a renowned ecologist and environmental biologist with several publications in the field.
Full disclosure: I personally know Dr.Deb, but this post is not a shameless plug to boost sales. I truly believe that what the book recommends is mankind's only real hope. See
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Developmentality-Constructing-Inclusive-Sustainability/dp/1844077128
Or
look it up on google
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers