Pacific Garbage Gyre 4 To 16 Times More Massive Than Thought; We Add 8 Million Tons Of Plastic/Year

[hatrack]

EDIT

The Garbage Patch has been described before. But this new survey estimates that the mass of plastic contained there is four to 16 times larger than previously supposed, and it is continuing to accumulate because of ocean currents and careless humans both onshore and offshore.

The “patch” is not an island or a single mass, leading some scientists to object to the name (which the current study uses). Instead, it’s a large area with high volumes of plastics, one in which concentrations increase markedly as you move toward its center. The debris ranges from tiny flecks to enormous discarded fishing nets, which make up 46 percent of the material, the study found.

EDIT

The most striking aspect of the findings — and perhaps the most damaging — was the large volume of fishing nets or “ghostnets,” said Chelsea Rochman, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies marine plastic but was not part of the current study. “This suggests we might be underestimating how much fishing debris is floating in the oceans,” she said in an emailed comment. “Entanglement and smothering from nets is one of the most detrimental observed effects we see in nature.”

The fact that the plastic content of the Patch is increasing is consistent with research that has been conducted on land, showing that waste volumes entering the ocean are large and increasing, said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia who has studied plastic waste processes. In a 2015 study, Jambeck found that humans are filling the oceans with an estimated 8 million tons of plastic every year, and that is expected to increase 22 percent by 2025. That matches what is now being seen in the ocean, in the form of an ever-accumulating garbage patch in the Pacific, though Jambeck also noted that much plastic sinks to the ocean bottom, and the fishing nets are being tossed in from boats, rather than dumped from the shore.

EDIT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/22/plastic-within-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-is-increasing-exponentially-scientists-find/?utm_term=.34d6b8c32686

[Bluepinky]

1. 😞 So sad.

[SonofDonald]

2. Fishing nets are being "Tossed in" from boats

Rather than dumped from the shore.

A horrible consequence yes, but maybe the person who came up with that statement should have paid a little more attention in class.

As fishing nets don't get "Tossed in" from a beach, they get washed overboard, get torn up and discarded, enter the water column from a sunken ship or snagged on an outcropping or a wreck or lost otherwise.

Just nit-picking but jeez that statement sounded stupid, especially when someone got paid to write that.

Someone who thinks they know what they are talking about.

Garbage has been dumped at sea since time immemorial, and until the Oil and Petroleum Act of 1990 every vessel at sea dumped their waste oil into the ocean, yup, pumped right over the side.

Fish processors in Alaska would anchor in a harbor to process the catch, and coat the bottom with processing waste, killing all marine life such as mollusks, crab, scallops, whatever lived in the sediment.

Then we have coral bleaching, dead zones, high ammonia content, overfishing leading to biomass reduction and non-targeted species reduction, "incidental catch".

I'm amazed there is anything left to exploit out there.