Out of Sight, Out of Mind

100-million tonnes of garbage. Flotsam – floating debris. Spread out over an area twice the size of the United States.

It’s all floating off the shores of California and Hawaii and other Pacific Rim nations. Much of it comes in the form of discarded plastic. From AlterNet:

The vast expanse of debris — in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump — is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he added.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. “You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.”

Few realize it but, with the exception of a very small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastic that’s ever been produced still exists somewhere. Recycling? Globally, we’re recycling somewhere between 3 to 5% of total production.

Drive through the back country of Mexico, for example. The sides of the roads are covered in discarded plastic bags. The fences are full of them. Unless you’ve seen it you can’t believe it.

 

Our Oceans in Peril

One sign of the troubles facing our oceans is the spread of jellyfish infestations. There seem to be two main causes of this – overfishing of species that normally feed on jellyfish and warming seas that extend their habitat.

A purple jellyfish, known as the “mauve stinger”, has plagued Spanish beaches and swimmers there for some time. Tourist operators now have to sweep the beaches and close in waters to keep them free of the problem.

Last week, the mauve stinger showed up, en masse, where it’s never seen – off the northeast coast of Ireland. An infestation there wiped out Ireland’s only salmon farm. From The Age:

The jellyfish, covering an area of around 26 square kilometres, engulfed the Northern Salmon Company’s cages off the province’s north-eastern coast, suffocating 100,000 fish, the firm’s managing director, John Russell, said.

“It was sheer devastation – I’ve been 30 years in the salmon industry and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr Russell said.

Staff on their way to give the fish their morning feed noticed a “reddish-brown tinge” to the sea and then realised the boats were struggling to make headway through an expanse of jellyfish over 10 metres deep, Mr Russell said.