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The Pacific Ocean Is Polluted With Coffee
An anonymous reader writes in with this excerpt from Inhabitat:"People aren't the only ones getting a jolt from caffeine these days; in a new study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, scientists found elevated concentrations of caffeine in the Pacific Ocean in areas off the coast of Oregon. With all those coffee drinkers in the Pacific Northwest, it should be no surprise that human waste containing caffeine would ultimately make its way through municipal water systems and out to sea – but how will the presence of caffeine in our oceans affect human health and natural ecosystems?"
if you check closelyy enough,most other waterways are,too
Geek Hillbilly
The fishies will be swimming stupidly faster with more energy!
More like "engergized"?
What do you think we caffeine drinkers should call ourselves?
Caffeinated sushi. *drool*
Neither the summary nor the linked article said the amounts, but they are listed in the original paper. In the ocean, they found 44.7 ng/L. "Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast measured up to 152.2 ng/L." For those who like their numbers in ppm, I believe that's .0447 ppm and .1522 ppm, respectively. Sometimes I fail at math, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fishermen bounce their lures up and down. Jittery fish!
that human coffe/tea consumption and pee will have an effect on the world's oceans.
Other human activities, yes, definitely. But not this.
I can only hope it is not as catastrophic as global warming has been on our ecosystem... Hahaha! /me puts
more styrofoam on the fire to combat the observed cooling trends.
Decidious
While this is not surprising and questionably news, I am a little more worried about the years and years of synthetic, biologically active drugs in the water. Birth control hormones don't exactly just disappear after you swallow them, and I know that they and other classes of petroleum based drugs have shown hormonal activity not only in mammals, but amphibians, fish, and birds. Though a world with huge breasted marine mammals would be cool, I am more concerned about the chemicals other than coffee that are following the same pathways and reaching the entire world. Miles deep into the ocean, thousands of miles through the atmosphere, there is really no where on the planet that has not been affected in at least a minor way by the expansion of human industry.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
Wiki says
Caffeine is metabolized in the liver by the cytochrome P450 oxidase enzyme system (to be specific, the 1A2 isozyme) into three metabolic dimethylxanthines. Further, In healthy adults, caffeine's half-life has been measured with a range of results. Some measures get 4.9 hours, and others are at around 6 hours.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that the source of caffeine in the ocean is from human waste, since the time spent in the gut exceeds the half-life of caffeine, and when metabolized, its no longer caffeine. There is of course still some small remaining un-metabolized caffeine in urine. A liter of espresso may contain as much as 2254 milligrams of caffeine. But when filtered through a human gut 5 to 10 milligrams/liter in urine is unusual, and 15mg/l gets you bounced from most sports programs as a sign of abuse.
It seems far more likely that the coffee poured out by restaurants, offices, and households, and the disposed of grounds being used for compost and gardening are a larger source than what comes out in the urine stream. Also the water Decaffeination processes is the source of the excess caffeine in city sewage, even though caffeine thus recovered can be marketed into the soft drink business, not all small operations bother with that.
Quoting the first linked source:
Caffeine occurrence and concentrations in seawater did not correspond with pollution threats from population density and point and non-point sources, but did correspond with storm event occurrence.
So it seems to me that the caffeine is just as likely entirely natural, perhaps produced in very low quantities by some naturally occurring plants in the predominantly coniferous temperate rain forests of the area, rather than by any human activity or byproduct. Such a low production would leach out into streams and rivers during storms, but not from municipal sewers, and hence would not correspond to population density.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Everybody wants to appear cool on the coast, so they buy coffee from Starbucks. Then they take a sip and find out that 'burnt' is not a pleasant flavor. The remainder gets pitched and winds up...
In the ocean.
The cup then gets refilled with something more to the American coffee drinker's palate, like McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, or 7-11.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I know I'll probably get modded troll for this, but good luck separating liberals in California from Starbucks!
Personally I've never acquired a taste for coffee. I know it has a few health benefits, but it's just too bitter.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You know, I thought things were going too far when I began seeing Starbucks on every street corner, and now I hear they're in the Pacific Ocean too! Fucking progress! Maybe some of the plastic islands and BP oil-globs will absorb the coffee and save the whales from the jitters. I must confess though, I'd like to see a porpoise after a few dozen shots of espresso.
~ Comment copy & pasted from original "anonymous" submission
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
*TWITCH!*TWITCH*
I'd like to swim upstream and spawn, but the last time I tried it, I wound up in Lake Erie! Eww! And MAN is the wind cold at supersonic speeds!
It took me almost a week to swim home! It would have happened faster, but I ran out of caffeine two-days from home. Hawaii was nice though.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah.
WE'RE VERY AWAKE DOWN HERE GUYS!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I could only read it and helplessly chuckle to myself thinking "Why, of course it is!".
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Kill All Humans
It's what Bender would suggest.
More than likely this will go nowhere and end up meaning little.
However, if one of the green groups gets traction with it, huge amounts of taxpayer money and reams of regulations will go into "Starbucks-abatement" programs.
Maybe we can even get another government-mandated toilet re-design. The last one accomplished a lot. Like making sure US Border Agents are spending time searching through semi's full of toilets from Mexico to make sure they are compliant with US regulations.
I guess we can now thank the US Government for the rise of Mexican illegal-toilet cartels.
Don't ask what they shoot you with.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Apparently quite positively:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-coffee-consumption-inversely-common-skin.html
What's more disturbing is the presence of all the other chemicals - antibiotics, illegal drugs, mood stabilizers and sex hormones.
It won't. Poison is all about the dosage. There's a LOT of water, and not much caffeine compared to that much water. Also, caffeine only works because it interfaces with specific receptors in our brains. It probably affects other mammals, but is not going to affect random fish or other aquatic life.
Not buying it.
An 8 oz cup of coffee is 236.5 ml and has 49mg of caffeine. Assume the entire thing was thrown away undrunk at all. The population of portland is about 600k. If we assume that everyone in portland throws away one full cup of coffee every day for 100 years and that every drop ends up in the ocean, that's 21.9b cups of coffee or approx 1 billion grams of caffeine.
100 years is plenty of time to diffuse. Its also plenty of times for caffeine to break down but less assume this were magic caffeine and so lasted the 100 years perfectly intact. Since they say the pacific ocean lets say none of it leaves the pacific for the other oceans. The pacific ocean is 7.721473366 × 10^21 liters. So cross multiplying (7.721473366 × 10^21× ) x (.049 g) / (.2365 l) us that that we are 1.6x10^20 grams so your billion grams falls 1.6x10^11 short. OK well lets assume that in addition to not breaking down it also doesn't diffuse. The Pacific is 361.1m kilometers in area. So lets assume that all the coffee hangs out for the entire century in the 2 kilometers nearest Portland, we still are short by 3 full orders of magnitude.
There is no way a bunch of 600k humans use enough coffee for the ocean to notice.
All the unemployed people drink a lot of coffee because they can't afford to eat. I know because I live this type of life.
Let's hope nobody dumps a bunch of frickin' lasers in the ocean too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Ill-Tempered Sea Bass!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It's more likely that Starbucks set up a Spy-Who-Loved-Me-esque secret under-sea base that serves as a combination processing plant where Jaws grinds beans for less than minimum wage and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos resides in a luxury suite off-shore tax haven.
TFA goes on to note that high levels of caffeine have been detected in Boston Harbor, but they're not suggesting any link between the levels and the tea party.The whole article is dubious, given that it consists of four whopping paragraphs and two stock photos (one of some plastic bags underwater someplace that sure doesn't look like the Oregon coast to me, and the other a closeup of someone's coffee) that take up more of the page than the actual body of the "article," which has no journalistic merit whatsoever. The actual paper that this all comes from is behind a paywall that wants $40. Nothing to see here... move along...
In the ocean, they found 44.7 ng/L.
The ocean contains about 1.3e9 km^3 or 1.3e21 liters. So 44.7e-9 * 1.3e21 = 5.8e13. That is about sixty million tons of pure caffeine. I don't believe it.
all the Caffeinated Fish!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are chemicals that can kill fish at 3 parts per billion. There are other things like salt that don't bother them as much, but it's really variable.
However, as other people have pointed out, there are lots of other chemicals getting dumped into the water system, including things like cocaine and prozac that have been processed through humans first. With caffeine, humans metabolize it so you wouldn't get much left, but there's all the caffeine in coffee grounds and waste coffee and soda.
And it is Portland.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This explains Dory from Finding Nemo.
This got me curious.
Apparently, according to different sources 50-100 plants produce caffeine in varying amounts, which makes sense as caffeine is an effective herbicide if you aren't trying to ward off primates with an inflated sense of self-importance.
Narrowing to California, the first species I found that California clearly has was the leaves and flowers of orange trees, though the only exact number I could find was "caffeine is found at concentration levels of 11-17. 5 milligrams per liter, mostly in citrus flowers.” California is a big orange-growing state though.
The other option I found was holly. Southeastern US varieties of holly are quite potent caffeine producers. Indeed, apparently ancient people's used to drink them like we drink coffee. I've seen these caffeine-rich recommended to Californians to use as hedges on some sites and while the zone map for the plant includes California I couldn't find out any info on how widespread the plant is in that region.
I wonder what other plants are rich in caffeine and also if normal plant leaf decomposition could get that caffeine into the water supply?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
another case of /. going fucking berserk over a horribly-written, patently false claim disguised as science. Read the article, better yet do a bit of research as some folks already have (read some other posts here), and see the steaming pile of crap that this 'story' is.
I know the /. gods will smite me down for seeming like a troll, but I'm tired of being quiet just because somebody doesn't like my opinion. Oh well.
So, given Obama's well known addiction love of cannabis a detection of cannabis compounds in Potomac River water would surely explain his bizarre behavior as President.
LOL
sharks with frickin' lasers...after a quad-shot of espresso
Surely the elevated levels of caffeine in the ocean .... must be a wake-up call!
How many libraries of congress is that, exactly?
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
If the title is true, that the Pacific Ocean is polluted with coffee, why don't the Pacific Ocean smell like a super giant pot of coffee ?
Remember, Caffeine doesn't only come from Coffee, tea - oh yes, TEA has caffeine, as well as Jolt Cola
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Next thing you know mermaids will be serving coffee on every street corner.
* Hardware Backdooring Is Practical
- The News (HTML):
http://news.techworld.com/security/3372954/
- The Paper (PDF):
http://www.toucan-system.com/research/blackhat2012_brossard_hardware_backdooring.pdf
From Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/
WE'RE VERY AWAKE DOWN HERE GUYS!
Just watch out for the sharks with frickin' lasers ON FRICKIN' CAFFEINE!!!
Lemon curry???
Add some Fukushima Daichi, trace steroids and hormone and you have the ultimate power drink, complete with salts and other minerals. Coming soon to a Starbucks near you! (to match the taste).
With all the drinks out there loaded with caffeine why is it coffee get's put under the spot light?
...because now they can't get anyone to sleep with the fishes.
So now we have caffeine hopped sharks that never sleep. They won't need lasers on their heads.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When they aren't sleeping, they're feeding.
Scientist A: Fish never sleep!
Scientist B: ...mystery solved.
Thanks, I'll be here all day. Try the veal.
I blame J J Thompson. He was the British physicist who invented the mass spectrometer. Now that we can measure chemical concentrations to one atom in a swimming pool anybody can claim that there is POLLUTION (tm) EVERYWHERE....
Actually, none of this would matter if scientists weren't funded by the state, and needed to keep 'finding out things' to justify their funding. In the days of amateur scientists people had a much better understanding of balancing the importance of discoveries.
So that's why fish don't blink!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
it's decaf.
Cocaine, Spices, Hormones Found in Drinking Water:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/011220/the-pacific-ocean-is-polluted-with-coffee
This is a very good thing! After all, a very definition of programmer is the bio-organic mechanism tasked with converting coffee to code. We will become the world of programmers!
what you are trying to say is the Pacific Ocean is fucking toast.
From teh fsckin plastic ta duh fuku radiation en duh tune-a-fishies
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/The_Deep_South
Hmm, isn't Chtulu sleeping at the bottom of the ocean?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
From Wikipedia:
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
You guys are editors - not content regurgitators or approval-bots. EDIT. Stop sucking!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We should dump cream AND sugar as well so they have choices!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I'm pretty sure there are more dangerous other things than coffee out there
Caffeine is a diuretic, so it makes fish pee more. Fish urine makes coffee taste terrible, so Oregonians will drink less coffee. It's a perfect example of a negative feedback cycle... that's the beauty of Mother Nature. Take note, Global Warming believers.
It gives you fins!
Maybe he lives in Victoria.
No brain, no pain.
Victoria, British Columbia still dumps raw sewage DIRECTLY into the ocean and has a thriving tea-party/creationist/anti-AGW style movement fighting any and every effort to fix it.
My US "coffee" experience (last sample 15 years ago) tells me, that the increase in caffeine in sea water cannot come from the US, as they normally carry a pea around the pot or shot it through. very similar to what the British call coffee. However, the cannot be blamed, they normally produce tea and their coffee is very similar. Therefore, the caffeine source must come from somewhere else. Maybe from Mexico.
But seriously, this means that caffeine passes the clarification plant just as many other drugs. And they can be much more dangerous to the environment. Maybe we should upgrade our plants to fix that.
So, most organic compounds break down over time in the environment. Won't caffeine also break down? At what sort of rate does it break down?
The only way I'd really be worried about caffeine in the water is if it's going to keep accumulating forever, or at such a high rate that it reaches meaningful concentrations.
From teh article: "it remains unclear whether caffeine is a ubiquitous contaminant of marine systems and if there is any trend in the distribution of caffeine relative to anthropogenic sources of caffeine contamination." There could be natural sources of caffeine washed into bays and coastal waters. Making the leap from caffeine to coffee contamination is, according to the authors, not justified.
That was probably me. Sorry, everyone...
The fish will now have the opportunity to turn the caffeine into theorems.
(With apologies to Alfred Renyi.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfr%C3%A9d_R%C3%A9nyi
The Thirst Mutilator!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
From the article: 44.7 nanograms of caffeine per liter of seawater.
That's the equivalent of one Red Bull in 1.7 million liters of water.
Let's see how "environmentally responsible" $tarbuck$ is when you tell them that their business activities are damaging mother earth. Somehow, despite all of their touted care for people and the environment, I'd bet they would rather increase their share price than decrease the Pacific's caffeine concentration.
And more importantly, where will all the special-snowflake, iCrap-toting hipsters drink their coffee when they realize the green aprons are actually the emperor's new clothes...
I can't count how many times I've wanted something like Aeroshot to inhale my caffeine so it could go straight to my blood stream, and here these fish are getting it for free! I wonder if they are breaking any patents? Sue the fish!
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Caffeine! It's what fish crave!
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Dilution is the solution.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
...but the first products won't be water, they'll be "energy drinks"....
mark "Ocean Bull has a real kick!"
I realize this isn't reddit, but, AMA.
I wasn't involved much in the study design in terms of the sampling methods themselves, but I did the site selection for the portion of our study that ended up published. It's been a few years but I still know it like the back of my hand.
I did all of the sampling itself and a large portion of processing the samples including the GC-MS portion. I was not involved much in the analysis except as a sounding board.
To address some of the concerns brought up thus far:
1) There are no known natural sources of caffeine in Oregon. There exists some coral in the indian ocean that secretes caffeine but nothing here locally, off-shore or terrestrial. Caffeine is not the best example, but, the idea is that it is a marker of human impact. We focused on waste water here because it's the most likely source.
2) Yes, you can accurately measure levels of ng/L. Yes, it's a pain. We actually did about a year of sampling, modifying our procedures, and tests before we were able to confidently prevent and rule out source of contamination. This even included not consuming caffeine in proximity to samples or before doing work with them.
3) I've not yet read the final paper (no uni access any more) but the other portion of the study we did was dosing pacific mussels with caffeine in a controlled environment. We looked at stress proteins, which are formed in response to environmental stressors, most notably heat. We did not observe an effect at the levels we measured in nature.
4) Excretion rate from humans is about 5%. Depending on the wastewater treatment regimen, primarily based on tertiary treatment like carbon filtering (very rare) and residence time, anywhere from 0% to 100% of caffeine can be removed. Further study here is necessary.
5) The half-life of caffeine in the environment is primarily heat related. Based on other studies we referenced, it's much longer in seawater. Off the top of my head the magnitude was on the order of 200 days in seawater vs 60-90 in fresh water. You should read the paper/references for exact numbers. This is far longer than the transit time from excretion to the ocean for most wastewater treatment. It does not bio-accumulate.
Beta is bad enough to make me go edit settings like this sig that haven't been touched since I joined
My fingers always tremble when I have had too much caffeine!
Josh Gellers writes: "The study showing abnormal levels of caffeine in the waters off the Oregon coast also suggested that the contaminants were predominantly coming from small-scale waste treatment systems such as household septic tanks, as opposed to large-scale wastewater treatment plants, which are regulated with much greater scrutiny. Such massive facilities are well-equipped to process the waste originating from cities in Oregon, which are comparatively smaller than major metropolitan hubs that have much more waste to contend with. For example, in Massachusetts, high levels of caffeine have been detected in Boston Harbor, likely the result of significantly greater quantities of wastewater that require treatment than those present in Oregon." Gee, I wonder why there is tea detected in Boston Harbor?!?! As to the coffee off Oregon's coast, well, we have crabs and they are very mellow, now. Yet another example of bad reporting. What the study actually said was: Caffeine was detected in Oregon coastal ocean waters measuring up to 44.7 ng/L. Caffeine occurrence and concentrations in seawater did not correspond with pollution threats from population density and point and non-point sources, but did correspond with storm event occurrence. Caffeine concentrations in rivers and estuaries draining to the coast ranged from below the reporting limit to 152.2 ng/L. So, figure out where those rivers dumping in to the Pacific were getting all that caffeine from should be what people are doing.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
Maybe all this caffeine in the water column will cause fish to be more alert and harder to catch. And if you do eat one, the caffeine jolt is already built in, making for an even healthier meal.
As a lifelong clinically-diagnosed migraine sufferer, I dealt with the classic symptoms of unbearable pain, aura, nausea, and diarhea up to 5 times a month. I discovered at the age of 56 that my 5+ decades of misery was caused by a B-vitamin deficiency--in partucular, B12, B6, and B3 (niacin). After years of taking Imitrex and other powerful natural triptans (which don't prevent, but do help migraines after the fact), I discovered that a few bottles of inexpensive nutrients from the dollar store absolutely prevented my headaches from occurring int the first place.
I feel like the bonds of slavery have been lifted. Vitamin deficiencies seem to be the last thing considered by neurologists and other specialists. There is a lot more money to be made with Imitrex, because my insurance was paying over $200 for nine tablets.
Maybe tea? Coke Cola? Medicine like some cold pills?
caffeine