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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.