While sitting in my dentist's office last week, I happened to receive a copy of the October 2007 issue of National Geographic Adventure, 'The Green Edition'. While casually leafing through it I came across an interesting half page article (page 68) on plastic islands in the middle of our oceans - floating garbage patches thousands of miles from land for large areas.
The subject of the brief article was an individual named Charles Moore, a sailor of note transpacific. Moore was and is the captain of the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita. It seems that Captain Moore was returning from a transpacific race in 1997 to its home port of Long Beach, California, when he noticed an unusual phenomenon - these islands made of plastic - in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area commonly referred to as "the Downturn, "
I had previously had some information on this unnatural occurrence while for others research Plastic pollution articles. But I passed through as they are not very reliable. These recent surfing accident piqued my imagination that it prominently in a journal of impeccable credentials. It had something there - something I could sink my teeth in. Not many of us are going ocean sailors, which may close this abomination, as well as Captain Moore. But apparently there are these islands - Mid Ocean huge garbage dumps caused by plastics and other wastes into the sea or washed into it from land, driven by winds and currents to mid-ocean, where they are up to this mass of pollution.
Captain Moore describes his first-hand observation of this in his article "Trashed ... On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Plastics, Plastics Everywhere", published in Natural History magazine in November 2003. In this interesting piece relates his first attention: "It was on our way home, after the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sailing race known as the Transpac, that my crew and I first saw the trash, floating in one of the outermost regions of the oceans all ... as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what would have a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see with the sight of plastic ... It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. ... "In the National Geographic Adventure article he says" The Gyre (slowdown) is calm and quiet, so that everything that swims ends there. We motored through shampoo bottles, bags, fishing nets. This went on for day; I was worried .. .. There are five similar gyres in the world, and it is quite likely, they are also contaminated. "Moore has since returned to the area several times done further study, and appreciates the accumulation of floating debris including Plastic to more than seven million tons. (Moore is the founder and researcher for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a non-profit group "for the protection of the marine environment and its watersheds through research, education and restoration." They could be your support. Get it at www. Algalita. org)
Shocking! As I researched the issue further my immediate reaction to this information was "Why have not I heard more about this?" The plastic pollution of our seas has apparently been known to researchers for years. Sometimes I think the scientific community is not adequately educate the general public about these types of things. They "research" and then do more research spending considerable effort and resources. Whatever and whenever they publish, it is usually only to scientific journals, that the reading public rarely, if ever, sees. I am convinced the people the willingness to help solve every problem, when they face the straight, nonscientific version of it. (There is nothing more boring to read than a scientist's report replete with scientific concepts generally not known what ordinary person.)
Apart of the obvious fact that these floating garbage dumps are unsightly, there are the less obvious effect than they have on marine life. A floating plastic bag, especially transparent in the seawater, a meal for the unsuspecting sea turtle recognizes that there is a jelly fish - a delicacy for the tortoise. After lunch, the plastic bags used in the turtle the stomach and intestinal contents, and it is indigestible. This can - and does - as fatal. Seabirds consume as floating plastic bottle caps. Dead birds' intestines were examined and found to these and other plastic fragments, the probable cause of the deaths. Plastics and other trash in our oceans is estimated to kill more than one million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and turtles each year according to United Nations reports. scientists refer to that plastic in the marine ecosystem has more than tripled in the last 40 odd years, and its effect is not yet fully determined. We know that it is not a positive one.
There are too many other harmful elements to various other marine mammals, birds, sea life and to them here in detail. online research will show the extent of the problem for those interested in learning more.
Since we have any plastic in large quantities only about forty years, this is a fairly new problem - one that escaped our attention, while it is truly unique in its scope and breadth. We can not "see" it in our daily lives. It is on the sea and therefore unthreatening for us ashore. We see sometimes made of plastic debris washed on our beaches and organize cleanups. Just imagine the logistics - and cost - to organize a cleanup of the great Pacific Ocean? There are millions of tons of this material out there - a task.
However impossible, we can do something, whereas here on terra firma. Use less plastic: replacement canvas reusable bags for your business is plastic bags while shopping. Do not discard plastic when they wash into the ocean or other waterways such as rivers and lakes . Let manufactures know that you are not satisfied with a ebermaigen use of plastics in packaging. (Always buy something in a large plastic package only to open it to a tiny dot on the packed since then we have to discard that the packaging on the landfill, where it will be perhaps hundreds of years to decompose - or worse, it is in our streams, rivers and oceans, where it finally together with other debris to more and graeren islands Plastic.)
In my case I have always been fascinated with the oceans. I loved these books as "Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a raft from Thor Heyerdahl, the South Pacific classic" Mutiny on the Bounty "and Herman Melville's "Type" and the like. I've always pictured the blue Pacific Ocean, especially the idyllic South Pacific, as a pristine place. Obviously, that is no longer the case.
I have sailed over a large part of the Atlantic and Pacific with the kind permission of the United States Navy - as a U.S. Marine "visiting" I might add. I must admit I was not looking for islands of the plastic during this trip. It bothers me now that we have large patches of floating Garbage out there, and we know so little about them. "Knowledge is power" they say. Find out about this and then do something to help, will not you? At least not discard your plastic in our waterways!
"Each single piece of rubbish has an owner. And every single person can make a difference by making sure they have their garbage with them when they leave the beach. "~ Andrea Crump, a litter projects coordinator with the Marine Conservation Society (United Kingdom) .
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Major Dennis Copson is retired from The United States Marines and is a resident of Oceanside, CA where he is the Director of Sales and Marketimg for Nature's Big Bud Worm Castings, Inc. He is also a freelance writer. More info is available on his website http://www.naturesbigbud.com
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