[SustainableTompkins] North Pacific subtropical gyre, again

[Thomas Shelley]

Dear Friends--The Giant Trash Bin in the Pacific is not a new 
phenomenon.  Below is a forwarded message from the Fostering Sustainable 
Behavior Listserv with an article from early 2004.  Tom

>Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:28:56 -0700
>From: Cynthia van Ginkel <cynthiavg at shaw.ca>
>To: Fostering Sustainable Behavior Listserv <fsb at cbsmlist.com>
>Subject: Cups analysis
>
>AWASH IN A SEA OF SYNTHETICS
>by Ian Connacher
>
>Saturday, January 17, 2004 - Page A21
>
>A car tire. A Japanese traffic cone. Ten-year-old water jugs. Fishing 
>floats from China and Russia. Miles of tangled fishing nets.
>
>This is some of the bounty found floating in the middle of the Pacific 
>Ocean in an area called the North Pacific subtropical gyre, which lies 
>between Hawaii and California. Charles Moore, sea captain, sailor and 
>ocean crusader, describes the area's combination of winds and currents as 
>creating "a sort of toilet-bowl effect where you've got a little bit of 
>depression in the middle and a circulating current brings stuff from the 
>edges into the centre."
>
>Since 1999, Capt. Moore has been trawling the ocean's garbage patches in 
>his 50-foot catamaran research vessel Alguita ("little kelp plant" in 
>Spanish). "It makes me very upset because I'm basically a marine mammal 
>and my habitat is now trashed," he says.
>
>He came across the gyre back in 1997, as he was returning home from a 
>regatta in Hawaii, and decided to take a shortcut. The
>North Pacific subtropical gyre is an area of flat calm that sailors tend 
>to avoid like the plague. His craft, however, was equipped with twin 
>diesels and an extra fuel bladder, so he headed into it. Its currents 
>collect decades worth of garbage. For 10 straight days, he couldn't look 
>over the side without seeing plastic debris.
>
>Capt. Moore would later learn that the area he had crossed is also known 
>among oceanographers as the "eastern garbage patch," a term coined by the 
>oceanographer and world-leading expert on floating debris, Curtis 
>Ebbesmeyer. "You have to visualize twice the size of Texas, swirling 
>around like the hand of a clock," says Prof. Ebbesmeyer.
>
>When he examined several specimens of jellyfish from the Pacific under a 
>microscope, he saw long slivers of fishing line and chunks of shredded 
>bags embedded in their bodies. He also took pictures of albatross chicks 
>literally filled with plastic bottle caps, lighters and balloons.
>
>"People have seen the mother birds cough up a plastic toothbrush to give 
>to the chicks," says Capt. Moore. "It's tragic." A former chemistry major 
>and veteran of a Sixties Berkeley commune, Capt. Moore has used his 
>personal inheritance from his family's sulphur plant to fund his 
>non-profit organization, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.
>
>To quantify the gyre's synthetic soup of debris, he began trawling the 
>patch using what he calls a manta trawl -- basically, metal wings with a 
>long, tapering sock to capture anything over one-third of a millimetre in 
>size. He was shocked to discover six pounds of plastic debris for every 
>pound of plankton.
>
>The problem is not limited to the North Pacific subtropical gyre: He's now 
>trawling at the mouths of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, to learn 
>where all this plastic is originating and how it travels. Just a little 
>rain can wash it from the land to the rivers and on to open water. "It 
>doesn't take a lot of rain to give us a lot of debris, because along with 
>the rain comes the wind and a lot of these things are very light," he 
>says. "The Styrofoam cups and the plastic bags are our modern tumbleweeds."
>
>After 15 minutes, the trawl is brought to the surface. At first, it 
>doesn't look like much -- some leaves, some plankton and a few insects. On 
>closer inspection, with the light just right, one can see tiny shards of 
>blue, pink and white plastic.
>
>The attributes that make plastic so ubiquitous today -- it is 
>indestructible, watertight and easy to shape -- are the very reasons why 
>it turns up in the middle of the ocean. "No. 1, it doesn't biodegrade," 
>explains Ann Zellers, a research biologist with the Algalita foundation. 
>"No. 2, it just gets more friable and breaks into smaller pieces. As it 
>breaks into smaller pieces, it becomes food for animals with the same 
>sized mouth."
>
>What's worse, petroleum-based plastics are hydrophobic -- water-repellent 
>-- but also lypophilic, which means they attract oily chemicals, some of 
>which are toxic, such as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. These 
>chemicals accumulate into the fatty tissue of fish, and pass up into 
>marine mammals and eventually humans. We'll eventually eat what we toss 
>into the sea.
>
>Capt. Moore steers the vessel past cargo ships anchored in the bay and 
>into open water. He's looking for a line of debris called a "windrow." 
>Within minutes, Styrofoam cups and plastic wrappers begin to appear in a 
>long line stretching out to sea. Excited, Capt. Moore orders the manta 
>trawl into the water.
>
>After 30 minutes, the trawl is emptied. There's a plastic Powerade label, 
>a plastic fork, a foam peanut with some plankton attached to it, and a 
>handful of pre-production plastic pellets called "nurdles." In a 
>three-month period, Capt. Moore's team has recovered more than a million 
>nurdles on Orange County beaches, weighing more than two tons.
>
>"We make a hundred billion pounds of these pellets every year," says Capt. 
>Moore. "Every plastic object starts its life as one of
>these pellets. And they escape from factories and make their way into the 
>ocean. They're the most common contaminant on our beaches."
>
>Rob Krebs, director of communications for the American Plastics Council, 
>insists that responsibility for this sea of synthetics does not lie with 
>his industry alone: "This is a problem that we all share and understand. 
>It is litter and it's human behaviour that's causing this amount of debris 
>in the ocean."
>
>Capt. Moore thinks one reason humans haven't yet galvanized around the 
>issue of plastics pollution is that the oceans are so vast, it's hard to 
>appreciate the scale of the problem -- or the effort required to do 
>something about it. "The average depth of the ocean is over a mile deep," 
>Capt. Moore points out.
>
>Meanwhile, out in the toilet bowl known as the North Pacific subtropical 
>gyre, the human-made bits keep swirling round and round. Ranking 
>environmental problems on a scale from one to 10, "I would rank oil spills 
>as a one," says Prof. Ebbesmeyer.
>"Plastic is a nine."
>
>Ian Connacher is an associate producer at Daily Planet on Discovery 
>Channel Canada.
>
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Tom Shelley
118 E. Court St.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 342-0864
tjs1 at cornell.edu
http://www.myspace.com/99319958