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'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' Far Bigger Than Imagined, Aerial Survey Shows (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined. A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the "great Pacific garbage patch," located between Hawaii and California. The density of rubbish was several times higher than the Ocean Cleanup, a foundation part-funded by the Dutch government to rid the oceans of plastics, expected to find even at the heart of the patch, where most of the waste is concentrated. The heart of the garbage patch is thought to be around 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles), with the periphery spanning a further 3.5m sq km (1,351,000 sq miles). The dimensions of this morass of waste are continually morphing, caught in one of the ocean's huge rotating currents. The north Pacific gyre has accumulated a soup of plastic waste, including large items and smaller broken-down micro plastics that can be eaten by fish and enter the food chain. Following a further aerial survey through the heart of the patch on Sunday, the Ocean Cleanup aims to tackle the problem through a gigantic V-shaped boom, which would use sea currents to funnel floating rubbish into a cone. A prototype of the vulcanized rubber barrier will be tested next year, with a full-sized 100km (62-mile) barrier deployed by 2020 if trials go well. "Normally when you do an aerial survey of dolphins or whales, you make a sighting and record it," said Boyan Slat, the founder of the Ocean Cleanup. "That was the plan for this survey. But when we opened the door and we saw the debris everywhere. Ever half second you see something. So we had to take snapshots -- it was impossible to record everything. It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."
"there is no island of trash in the pacific"
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_next_20/2016/09/the_great_pacific_garbage_patch_was_the_myth_we_needed_to_save_our_oceans.html
Because it's really a tiny garbage patch. A complete loser garbage patch. A weak garbage patch.
When I'm president, we'll have a garbage patch that'll make your head spin. A big, classy garbage patch that Americans can finally be proud of.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wouldn't a huge sieve designed to strain out the plastic catch everything else as well? Like, you know, fish and seabirds and other critters?
Having read the FAQ on the Ocean Cleanup website, what they are proposing is not a seive, more of a barrier - it's intending to collect the larger floating pieces, not the smaller ones.
Why doesn't the original article have any pictures of this giant patch?
Because the patch is not actually visually distinctive.
People read these stories and think we're talking about something that looks like a floating landfill - but, by all accounts, that's not the case. You still mostly just see water and only occasionally see a piece of trash.
#DeleteChrome
All that plastic rubbish is not collected into a huge floating island, nor does it look at all impressive on photos (which is why there are none in the articles). It isn't clumped together - it's more like flecks of plastic floating in a soup.
That does not lessen the problem. There's still a vast amount of debris out there, just spread out a lot, over multiple areas. And any plastics that do break down form "microplastics" that have now found their way into more than a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and China.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That was what I was wondering too but it's not going through a sieve.
From the Ocean Cleanup site: https://www.theoceancleanup.co...
Building an artificial coastline in the center of the Garbage Patch.
Instead of using nets, The Ocean Cleanup uses solid screens which catches the floating plastic, but allows sea life to pass underneath the barrier with the current.
It's all detailed there, but basically the current goes around in a big circle, they build the "artificial coastline", funnel it to a central point and collect it.
There are several *independent* documentaries that provide not only photos, but -- much to your heart's desire -- actual video footage of said patches. I'd recommend starting with the film Plastic Paradise (the film isn't that great, but it will provide what you seek). There's VICE's TOXIC: Garbage Island (also available on YT in 3 parts), which provides actual footage, and Midway: A Message from the Gyre.
What you'll see in all the documentaries is not an island of floating trash, but water that is actually filled with plastics and other crap, mostly under the water line. In 2 of the 3 I linked above, you'll see them essentially using a sieve though small spots only to get a large sum of trash, a lot of which can't degrade fast enough, thus harming sea life in several ways.
As with all information, take from this what you wish.
Because it is a very large area of the ocean in which plastic particulates float. It probably doesn't look much different from the rest of the ocean to the naked eye.
You don't realise that, because you haven't read the article, nor any of the linked articles that might help further your understanding of the problem. That's ok, you're probably busy. I've taken the following quote from here, to help you out a bit.
The debris is continuously mixed by wind and wave action and widely dispersed both over huge surface areas and throughout the top portion of the water column. It is possible to sail through the “garbage patch” area and see very little or no debris on the water’s surface. It is also difficult to estimate the size of these “patches,” because the borders and content constantly change with ocean currents and winds. Regardless of the exact size, mass, and location of the “garbage patch,” manmade debris does not belong in our oceans and waterways and must be addressed.
Calling a lot of floating bits of garbage an island is indeed a lie, but the lie is coming from the person framing it this way for a "goalpost shift" and not those actually talking about water dense with garbage.
I can see why the poster with the goalpost shift was far too ashamed of their action to even post under a username.
To find the plastic-eating bacterium described in the study, the Japanese research team from Kyoto Institute of Technology and Keio University collected 250 PET-contaminated samples including sediment, soil and wastewater from a plastic bottle recycling site.
Next they screened the microbes living on the samples to see whether any of them were eating the PET and using it to grow. They originally found a consortium of bugs that appeared to break down a PET film, but they eventually discovered that just one of bacteria species was responsible for the PET degradation. They named it Ideonella sakainesis.
Further tests in the lab revealed that it used two enzymes to break down the PET. After adhering to the PET surface, the bacteria secretes one enzyme onto the PET to generate an intermediate chemical. That chemical is then taken up by the cell, where another enzyme breaks it down even further, providing the bacteria with carbon and energy to grow.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-n...
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-n...
it's in my head
Nothing published in the federalist ever counts as "debunking" or indeed anything other than "blatant lies to support our fantasy dream world".
You really want to know what a deregulated market looks like ? Think Chicago during prohibition. Now before you go yelling about how prohibition *was* regulation - that's smoke and mirrors, the people who remained in the business after it was illegal - were the ones who didn't care about the law - and so they didn't obey regulations of any kind. A black market is always an entirely deregulated market - the very regulation that prohibits it also makes it deregulated in practical terms.
What do black markets look like ? Killing the competition is a valid way to stay competitive. Shooting your own staff if they underperform is a perfectly viable way to keep workers productive. Turf wars. Torture - and the community living in fear with a rapidly declining life expectancy.
But that's what EVERY business will do if it thinks it can. Because that will always be the most profitable way to run any business. The ones who are run by people that wouldn't *do* that - well they don't stay in business.
Prohibition is not an argument against regulation - it is an argument against prohibition but it's a false equivalence to pretend those are the same thing. It's proof of what deregulation inevitably leads to. It turns every market into a gangwar, every industry into a mafia.
Back during the industrial revolution it was standard practise to rape a female employee every Friday afternoon to keep workers disciplined. Every single factory owner in the UK did it. Every fucking one of them. It was 'rape' of the 'fuck me or I fire you' variety but rape nonetheless. The interesting thing is - a LOT of those factory owners kept diaries. They all admit to doing it in their diaries. They also, every one of them, write about how abhorent they find it. Many of them were once men who would find such behaviour disgusting. So why do it ? Because all the other factory owners do - if I don't, I'll have less disciplined workers than them - I could not compete, I would be out of business. Every single one of them blames all the others for forcing him to become a rapist.
That's business without regulation. Regulation is designed to prevent the most profitiable business practises (which is why libertarians hate it) but that is not a bad thing - because the most profitable business practises are always the ones that kill people. You simply cannot preserve life and the welbeing of others as cheaply as you can destroy it. You simply cannot ever compete more efficiently than to put your competition out of business for the price of a bullet.
And because this is the reality, those who embrace this as an outcome they want must constantly lie about reality. They must pretend that reality is something other than it is. Lying about the bad things rich people will do to get richer becomes standard practise. Once you do that- you will lie about anything that threatens the rich's ability to kill to get richer. There's a problem though - nobody believes a pathological liar... what to do what to do... oh I know, accuse everybody else of being pathological liars, misrepresent what they say, tell clever lies like when somebody speaks of arctic ice melt you link them to an article about the ice growing and hope they don't notice that this is in the antarctic and actually the growth is only in surface area, the volume is decreasing, and even then all the new shallow ice is refrozen melt-off from the arctic (fresh water freezes more easily than salt water).
And in that grand tradition of flat out lying about reality, but doing it very cleverly, comes the federalist with another classic case. There are lots of reasons why microplastics are bad for the ocean and people - their spelled out all over this board by many posters - the article never denies the massive amount of microplastics around, it just says "not many big pieces" and pretends that disproves the shit ton of plastic floating around
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *