10 Million square miles of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean

[taught_me_patience]

Pacific Ocean Plastic Mistaken for Plankton Threatens Wildlife

By Adam Satariano

April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Marine researchers Charles Moore and Marcus Eriksen surveyed the dark water of the Pacific Ocean aboard a catamaran about 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) north of Hawaii in January and found trash everywhere.

They were in the eye of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, where opposing ocean currents form a vortex bigger than Australia, trapping tons of floating debris in its circular flow.


.....

The vortex covers about 10 million square miles north of the equator, rotating clockwise from about 300 miles off California's coast to near Japan. It's the result of prevailing winds that move west to east on the northern side and in the opposite direction to the south.

more
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a14k5rGoGenk&refer=home





I'm ashamed that we are doing this to the environment...

[gateley]

1. I weep for our planet.

Before our assault on it, this planet NOURISHED all that lived upon it. Gave us life. Nurtured us.

I, too, am ashamed, and heartbroken. Part of me wants her to shake us all off, like a dog with fleas, so she can begin to heal and thrive again.

[Owl]

4. Very well said, I completely agree.

Our progeny will find it hard to find or experience anything not despoiled by war, pollution, debt, greed, negligence, ignorance, etc.

[Winterblues]

14. USA ~ USA ~ USA ~

:shrug:

[DS1]

2. Yes. But people still need their lazy fucking one serving plastic cups of coffee grounds

:eyes:

[kevinbgoode]

3. Wouldn't we save a ton of money

and oil if we just got rid of most of the plastic? What is wrong with returnable soda containers anyway? And all of these water bottles...sheesh...I'm embarrassed at how much throwaway garbage I have and I live alone. Everything is wrapped in plastic.

[givemebackmycountry]

5. I guess we never heeded the golden rule of....

YOU DON'T SHIT WHERE YOU EAT!

I walked out my door this morning, and there were about 20 plastic grocery store bags strung up in a tree outside my building.

What did that asshole say to Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate?"

"Plastics, son. Plastics."

10 million square miles of it.

What a bunch of PIGS we humans are.

We deserve an asteroid the size of Nevada to take us all out.
Because, we sure don't deserve to inhabit this once beautiful big blue ball we all live on.

Now, all we need is for some hot shot alcoholic Monkey to shoot a NOO-CLEE-ER weapon off in some far away middle eastern country.

Oh wait, that's coming too.

[taught_me_patience]

9. Plastic bags are the worst

The wind catches them and they get blown all over the place. Too bad my local albertsons doesn't even offer the choice of paper or plastic anymore...

[crispini]

16. Bring your own!

That's the solution right there.

[MadAndy]

6. If plastics never break down, how did the pieces get to be 1-2 mm in size?

If they started as bottles and got to be that small, wont they break down completely?

[kestrel91316]

7. The constituent polymers are not any shorter. They are just in smaller clumps, so to speak.

Tiny pieces of plastic are still plastic. They are so tiny, in some cases, that they get ingested by MICROSCOPIC life forms that then can't digest them.

If we kill off the rotifers with all our plastic, I am gonna go ballistic. I love rotifers.
http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artnov99/rotih.html

[Ikonoklast]

8. Misleading. There isn't 10 million square miles of trash.

I don't think that it is possible to cover 14% of the total surface of the Pacific ocean in trash. It would be seen from outer space.

Now, if you said that in this ten million square mile area, there was trash found, I would say that is probably correct.

Hyperole doesn't help their cause.

If they say that they found .01 gram of plastic in every square meter of water, as stated in the article, that is vastly different from trash covering 10 million square miles of ocean surface.

[gateley]

13. There was a photo of a plastic "island" -- if not "continent" in the

ocean which was chilling. I'm trying to find it now. Anybody?

[Psst_Im_Not_Here]

18. I remember it

and could swear it was on DU. I wanted to print out the picture onto fabric transfer paper and iron it onto the outside of my fabric shopping bags. Can't seem to find it now.

[brystheguy]

15. This gyre doesn't grab people. Not even me.

I agree that this isn't what we think it is.

I don't like it either but we can do better than talk about this gyre. There are no pictures of this gyre out there that make it look like anything. There are no satllite photos. When I first heard about this thing I pictured this huge mass of floating plastic that you could hardly get a boat through that was all tangled up with fishing nets, etc. It seriously looks fine from the surface.

I watched a video once about it and watched a crew go through it. They would go along and say, "there's a bottle." and such. It's horrible but it just doesn't have the shock value to make people wake up.

[taught_me_patience]

17. Out of sight, out of mind

is the mindset of most people today. You are right... this gyre has no shock value.

[Gonnuts]

10. ... and I say to myself - it's a beautiful world ...

or it use to be Satchmo ... it use to be ...

[Xenocrates]

11. It was discovered in 1997??

That was more than 10 years ago. For a vortex the size of 10 million square miles, whose going to pay for cleanup, let alone how its going to be cleaned up. The ones making the stuff are going to push for more litter control? wtf?

[1776Forever]

12. When I read this I thought of all the space junk in our atmosphere......

I worked for the Shuttle Industry in Florida and we used to joke that the Shuttle was going to turn into a big Trash Hauler with Chewbacca on board. That would actually probably a pretty good way to use these in the future but who knows what is going to happen to them in 2010!

It seems to me that the United Nations should be working on this Ocean and Space trash! This may be a good way to bring all the countries to the table.