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Ninety-Nine Percent of the Ocean's Plastic Is Missing
sciencehabit writes Millions of tons. That's how much plastic should be floating in the world's oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study (abstract) finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it. If that's the case, "there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web," says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. "And we are part of this food web."
Is that water, the ultimate solvent -- or perhaps bacteria -- are breaking down the plastics back into it's components, and the ocean (much like the oil from the BP spill) is taking care of itself.
Naw, couldn't be. Go ahead and panic, hippies!
That's the most obvious answer. Fish do not eat plastic, and even if they did, they couldn't digest it.
isn't it just depositing itself to the bottom and creating new form of plastic rocks?
Wait. Isn't Slashdot supposed to link me to articles? I know no one RTFA, but if there isn't any link at all and just a blurb, what's the point?
...is that there is a complex ecosystem of micro-organisms that are breaking down the plastic into lesser components that we aren't looking for? I mean, there is a LOT about the ocean we don't yet understand. I mean, we know more about our solar system than we know about the entirety of the ocean ecosystem. That's not to say that the plastic BELONGS there or that we shouldn't be trying to reduce our uses for plastics - just that perhaps we aren't finding them in their entirety because there is some natural processes at work beyond fish consumption.
Plastic has lots of energy (try burning it) and thus could be a food source in and of itself. Thus there could be a bacteria that is eating it. Where this is disturbing is that we like to put useful plastic things into the water such as fibreglass boats. Could there be a bacteria evolving that will start corroding our plastics?
Also the fish that eat it may now have a gut bacteria that will break it down.
Whatever the truth turns out to be I suspect it will be fascinating!
It turns out all those warnings about littering and polluting were just so much alarmist bullshit!
It was me, I'll put it back.
I didn't think anyone would care :-/
I put my hands up!
They're playin' my song!
The plastic's gone away!
I'm bobbin' my head like a fish.
This plastics a lovely dish.
I put my hands up!
They're playing my song!
There's plastic coming out of the sink!
Wondering in my head...where the hell is the link?!
captcha: Miley
Where is the link to the article?
The tiny plastic beads and broken down bits end up in fish flesh, this has been established.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3020951/these-big-eyed-fish-are-vacuuming-up-our-plastic-pollution-at-night
Plenty of information on this out there. 19% of all fish caught in a single survey in Hawaii had plastic in the bellies.
Bring on the Australian philosophers...
tic.
Maybe someone is actually breaking down the stuff... or it's ending up at the bottom of the ocean (too deep for us to find). Either way... :)
...or I started to write it when Slashdot showed no submissions on the page, but when I hit post on it - there were already a post or two (story of every Slashdot page ever)?
Whoever thinks that plastic isn't already part of the global food web hasn't eaten at a McDonalds recently
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
I was planning to start my empire on one of them massive floating plastic islands next year. Guess I'll have to wait.
When a science fiction concept turns into something pretty much like reality. It was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel "The Mote in God's Eye" that predicted animals would evolve to live off the castoffs of an industrialized society. And that may well be the case now! I mean plastic is derived from hydrocarbons that were derived from decayed plant material to begin with. A lot of what we humans eat is derived in part from decayed plant material, so it's quite possibly not even something to worry about. Heck maybe fish (or some plastic eating single celled organism that will adapt to above water level oxygen and destroy modern society) are just cleaning up the oceans for us!
I've been scooping it up from the oceans and burning it. It's worth buying a ship to collect the stuff if you've got a few mega tonnes of bauxite to refine.
The article doesn't say the fish flesh has plastic bits in it.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Eco nuts will disagree, but not too many years ago a high school student did a science project and showed that with the right bacteria plastic shopping bags could biodegrade in a matter of weeks. The key was getting the right bacteria in quantity. He started with plain old dirt from his yard. IIRC it was slashdot that reported the story. If a high school student can do it from back yard dirt, certainly trillions of gallons of water have enough bacteria to degrade plastic as well. We are not drowning in eco waste. Nor are the oceans going to be bubbling away anytime soon.
Where's TFA?
You're not a veggie. You're either a vegetarian or a vegan.
Unless you meant a vegetable, in which case you should fit right in with most of the Slashdot crowd.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
When you don't have an answer for the whereabouts of 90+% of the stuff your scientific theory calls for, call it dark and get some grant money to find it...
Degrades plastic slowly over time. Most plastic will float in water.
It getting into guts is a different problem.
Plastic microbeads are _excellent_ at absorbing many pollutants onto their surfaces.
When this is eaten in quantity, this can be a really efficient way for those pollutants to get into the fish - and hence into the food-chain.
If it floats in water, it is going to get hit by perpetual exposure to UV radiation.
The same way sailors get sun burnt very quickly. UV gets reflected by water, enlarging the exposure. UV tears apart molecular bonds, which is why, for example, the ozone layer is so important.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Millions of tons. That's how much plastic should be floating in the world's oceans...
Um, no, it shouldn't be in the ocean at all... maybe there have been vast over estimates of how much was there to begin with. After all, nobody should be putting it there on purpose.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Here's the "Science" magazine page:
http://news.sciencemag.org/env...
and here's the referenced paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
"It wanted plastic"
George Carlin
And here's to you Mrs. Robinson...
Table-ized A.I.
"Jedem das Seine"
Fish also eat sand and lots of other things. It passes through them. You are the same way. Not everything you eat is nutritious or digested. You poop, right!?!
Or perhaps it settles to the bottom of the sea and future scientists will call it the plastacine boundary which occurred just at the time of the great extinction number nine, number nine, number nine...
Disturbingly 99% of data missing from scientific study. Where could all of it have gone?
Somebody stole it and made it into jillions of AOL disks
Table-ized A.I.
Oceanographers are at a loss to explain the lack of plastic floating in our oceans. "Where the fuck did it go?" asked Omar Roberts, head of oceanography at the Skips Institute. "We've thrown shit-tons of plastic into the ocean. Where is it?"
Omar, though, has a theory. "The Kraken ate it. We're feeding the fucking Kraken. Jeeeesus!"
marine animals are ingesting it with or instead of their food. If so, is it possible some species will evolve to digest plastic and metabolize it? Will that make those creatures toxic to humans?
....which is why, for example, the ozone layer is so important.
Ozone layer depletion is leading to premature deterioration of my precious plastics!
"Ninety-nine percent of the ocean's plastic is missing" Who writes the titles to these articles? You'd think that the great god Neptune had been the victim of a plastic burglary!
It's not really a food "web". It's more like a series of tubes, you see...
The original estimate was wrong.
Of course, this doesn't fit with the Enviro-Disaster meme that every new piece of information should headline with 'It's worse than we thought!'.
..can't find a god damn plane.
In this educational video.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hypothetical stuff causes hypothetical problems. Wow, I would have never thunk it! Let the paranoia.. er fun begin!
Before you claim troll show me where in the non-existent TFA (yes, I read this one) they come up with: 1) Their estimated "millions of tons". 2) How many "millions" are they claiming. 3) Why the only possible explanation is that fish are eating it (so now it's in your food). Nope, I'm not going to wait. They use a 1970 study that showed .1% of plastic washes into the ocean. This was the same time that we had TV commercials with American Indian's crying on TV because people on average were dumping their shit everywhere. We also had everyone pumping out CFCs for everything in a can.
I agree that "The Great Pacific Garbage Dump" is a huge problem, and know that the same problems exist in every ocean. Fantastic theories (or fantasy depending on your perspective) requires evidence, and there is none to back TFA. None of this addresses the real problems causing dumping (like greed and a lack of enforced regulation, or wars).
The last paragraph of TFA says it all. "We really don’t know what this plastic is doing.” So the point of the article telling people fish are eating the plastic is what exactly?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's becoming plastiglomerate! See: http://www.geosociety.org/gsat...
Before throwing out all of this FUD, can't we wait for the research to tell us what's going on, before OMG IT'S IN THE FOOD SUPPLY!
That's good, right?
the amount of plastic in the ocean numbers have always been riddle by flaws. I don't me out of bounds from error bars, I mean flaws. Everything from the 'garbage Island, to report of large amount of underwater plastic no one can seem to find.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's the underwater plastic gnomes.
Step one get plastic.
Step two . . .
Step three Profit!
Finally i have figured out Godzilla's food source.
Welcome to the new paradigm. The Earth plus plastic
Honestly, while I always agreed with the premise, it seems to have taken much less time than I would have thought.
This signature is false.
Oh, go eat some tofu, hippie, and leave those of us who like McDonalds alone, mmmkay?
First, if fish (or other marine animals) were eating the plastic (and there is a lot of evidence that they are) then they would also be starving to death (as they can't digest the plastic, and it fills up their digestive systems). When they die, the plastic would be returned to the ocean, and we would see it in our assays. So I don't think that the plastic getting eaten is the obvious solution.
Second, as anyone who has gotten sunburned while swimming knows, water doesn't block ultraviolet light very effectively, so plastic floating near the top of the water column would be exposed to a lot of UV. Plastic breaks down pretty quickly when exposed to UV, so we may just be seeing the natural destruction of the plastic by sunlight (and, I suppose, that plastic that has been partially broken down by exposure to UV might be more easily consumed by bacteria, but that's pure speculation).
Third, maybe we aren't measuring the amount of plastic in the ocean correctly. If the plastic is being consumed, or is sinking to the ocean floor, then we might easily be missing it. Also, the plastic might well not be evenly distributed across the ocean: it may be collecting in specific places due to winds and ocean currents. If we are not collecting samples evenly over the entire ocean, then we could be missing some high concentration areas.
I doubt that this means we can all breath a sigh of relief and decide that dumping plastic in the oceans is no big deal. I also doubt that this means that plastic is a much bigger problem than we thought (how could it be a bigger problem then we thought? People have been screaming about it like it was a sign of the end-times!). It is interesting, however, and I would like to know why our measurements don't match our expectations.
just a ghost in the machine.
http://news.sciencemag.org/env...
Interesting fact: I have never eaten a McDonald's fish sandwich. Can someone less biased chime in on the taste?
Honestly it's hard to tell the difference between beef, chicken, or whatever at most places because all you taste is fried flour and salt.
Despite the Chicken Littles' fears, all 'plastics' that I'm aware of are degradable and do in fact degrade in natural settings if given adequate time. Not long times, either. The so-called long-lived fluorocarbon plastics (those in the "Teflon" family) are used for weather-resistant coatings for materials exposed to the outdoors, and most are expected to not last longer than ten years. Solar radiation is a major factor. The energies imparted to plastic molecules via the sun tend to break the chemical bonds of complex compounds down to successively simpler compounds, which make for foodstuffs for microorganisms and gases that find their way to the atmosphere. This has been talked about by materials scientists for decades. The greater public is just generally unaware, as usual. Those that are heavier than water tend to sink, and that's another matter.
Plastic clumps together with other minerals and forms rocks.
http://news.sciencemag.org/ear...
OK, so if fish have already eaten it and it has not yet entered the food chain, we just have to avoid eating calamari and other non-fish oceanic creatures, and we'll be fine.
To most of you guys "plastic is plastic", that's all to it
But the truth is plastic is _more_ than mere plastic --- it is a combination of many types of chemicals, all mixed together to achieve the characteristics of the plastic that it needs to have
To see it another way, a plastic is like a steak. It is definitely _not_ only a piece of beef, but also the sauce (which itself is made of the starchy gravy - which can be broken up to other more basic components, - the flavoring [salt, sugar, spices, and so on]), plus the added chemicals, such as the aromatics (which is largely benzene group) that were formed when that beef was put over the fire
Same thing with plastics - it is not only the acrylic resins, but we also need to account for additives such as the plasticizers, color, elastomers, and so on, plus other chemicals that were produced as a by-product of the mixing of all those chemicals over a "heated process"
When we can eat steaks, the different bacteria inside our guts dissolve different ingredients from the steak that we have eaten
Bacteria are not like human beings - they do not have other bacteria in their guts !
Most often a type of bacterium may be able to digest a type of ingredient within a type of plastic, and that is all to it, which means, the other chemicals inside the plastic are still left intact, not dissolved, not digested, not broken down
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Thats my guess.
Would a square mile of seawater with no scraps of floating plastic harbor more life than a square mile of seawater with a 10' layer of plastic debris? While it does not seem .. ahh .. traditional, maybe that would be a silver lining. Doesn't make sense to use a plastic utensil for 10 minutes and then relegate it to 100 year of status as trash... The world is not that big ... Plus... not every experience with plastic is bad. Put it another way.. We have huge volumes of Non Biodegradable plastic crap in the ocean... What can we do to make it a positive? Its already happened.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
or the abysses of the worlds oceans, and there it shall remain and likely be compressed into who-knows-what which will be mined by future life forms for some sort of useful purpose. Lets all listen to "Send your love" by sting and pat ourselves on the back for the great job we're doing.
Sci-Fi author Larry Niven predicted this in his book "Ringworld." He imagined that trash dumps full of room-temperature super conductors would breed bacteria capable of breaking down the room temperature super conductor. From the time the civilization on the ringworld noticed their trash dumps were surprisingly empty, until their civilization ended was such a short time period that archeologists can find almost no records of that time.
When bacteria start eating plastics like week-old-hamburger-meat, we're screwed. Maybe we can delay the inevitable by keeping our plastics dry.
ARGH!! My SHTF gun is a Glock! I'm screwed!
I found some pertinent information here:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/how-long-does-it-take-for-plastics-to-biodegrade.htm
Now, what are we talking about? The non biodegradable ones (Carbon-Carbon) or the ones with polypeptide bonds?
What about the bisphenol A found in these regions? Would you really want to consume that? Let's feed it to that idiot who pointed out that it's just Carbon, and we ought to be safe consuming it.
We should have invented eco-friendly plastics the first time, or we owned the harm we have caused.
is that less than 100 years ago oceans were absolutely pristine... and now we know the dangers of our actions and yet the legislators and politics which should be our public servants and represent the global voice of the people are ignoring the situation and taking only weak and localized actions. Where are we heading? Waiting for a random natural bacterial mutation to solve all our problems? Is it still a matter of 'faith' with humans? 'Someone' / ' something' will take care of it... We should change radically remove all our current ruling class and do the best we can with our only Planet, cease this totally insane tribal 'economy' driven society and do only what's best to live in a balance with the environment. We are little men that can only build a fleet of massive solar powered cleaning boats if someone move some paper and numbers in a computer to allocate 'xxx' billions in some bank account. This is so insane.....
The plastic went to the same place as Flight MH370 - the bottom - where it got covered up by fish poop.
https://news.yahoo.com/88-perc...
I'm confused by these reports. What are the real facts?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
toc.
Animals eat it, die, and sink. Vast plastic reserves at the bottom of the ocean.
no way! Bear Grylls uses this to survive on islands for tv shows!
http://goo.gl/1GY2fq .. Very quick, very dirty, and I like mine with jusssst a twist of lemon.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it. If that's the case, "there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web," says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. "And we are part of this food web."
Another disturbing possibility is that Aliens have introduced genetically engineered elastic polymer life forms into the oceans. They're eating the plastic and when they fully mature they'll attack major metropolitan cities!
We're humans. We're not part of the ecosystem. That sounds like liberal nonsense. Nothing we do can possibly go wrong.
Stuff gets stuck to the plastic (bird shit, I don't know, something) and it sinks. Anyway, the ocean is massive so it doesn't really matter. We should dump all of our waste out there and let nature take care of it for us there is *loads* of room in the Ocean.
Interesting fact: I have never eaten a McDonald's fish sandwich. Can someone less biased chime in on the taste?
It's a typical professionally-designed Mickey Dee's product with nicely balanced flavors. Maybe it's not everyone's cup of tea, but there's nothing terribly wrong about it. Give it a shot and taste it some day. Great with cola and fries.
FYI, BPA is not present the the PETE plastic used in water and soda bottles. It WAS present in polycarbonate bottles (rigid clear bottles) such as those used in reusable 5-gallon bottles, and other rigid clear bottles.
That explains the direction into which culture in general seems to be going. We are what we eat.
Not to say that American influence has anything to do with it, oh not, not at all.
end up eating shit. What could be more appropriate?
They left a message: "So long, and thanks for all the plastic"
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Or maybe the entire premise that there is millions of tons of plastic in the ocean was bullsh*t fearmongering.
so thats why no one can locate that giant island of plastic floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean using google earth. or,are they estimating using one of the governments extremely accurate accounting logarithms.
No, I'm not serious about eating it. But...if my cats are any indication, LOTS of animals are eating the stuff. I have one that thinks it should be his main course for every meal. ...And yes, that means that I've had to cat-proof my house by hiding and disposing of all plastic.
" or for all we know they’re puking [the plastic] or pooping it out, and there’s no long-term damage. We don’t know.” If this is the case, then the plastic is eventually going to buried under sediments, and at some point will either be subducted where it will convert to various metamorphic rock, or become molten and mix with water and magma and be erupted as igneous rock, or perhaps it will undergo catagenesis and be converted back to petroleum and natural gas, from whence it came.
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
There has been stories reported where fish are dying for no apparent reason and are found to have pieces of plastic lodged inside of them that they had ate. This 99% claim of plastic gone missing that is in the sea does not even seem like a very valid or thorough study...
Fools and horses.... It's obvious if you would just ask former Congressman Dennis Kucinich from Ohio, the missing plastic has been stolen by aliens. They fly into the oceans and steal it! Then they eat it. It was in the Washington Post last week. Don't you read?
......maybe it's not "missing". Maybe the people that claimed all this plastic was there were LYING ALL ALONG? YA THINK?????
JEEZ.
Hello it's all in the giant Pacific Coast Garbage Patch! Look it up be informed.