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    Question Great Pacific Garbage Patch

    Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

    Mario Aguilera / Scripps Institution of Oceanography
    SEAPLEX researchers encounter a large ghost net with tangled rope, net, plastic, and various biological organisms during a 2009 expedition in the Pacific gyre. Matt Durham (seen wearing a blue shirt) is pictured with Miriam Goldstein.


    By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com
    The amount of plastic trash in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased 100-fold during the past 40 years, causing "profound" changes to the marine environment, according to a new study.
    Scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego found that insects called "sea skaters" or "water striders" were using the trash as a place to lay their eggs in greater numbers than before.




    In a paper published by the journal Biology Letters, researchers said this would have implications for other animals, the sea skaters' predators -- which include crabs -- and their food, which is mainly plankton and fish eggs.





    The scientists also pointed to a previous Scripps study that found nine percent of fish had plastic waste in their stomachs.
    The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" -- which is roughly the size of Texas -- was created by plastic waste that finds its way into the sea and is then swept into one area, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, by circulating ocean currents known as a gyre.
    NOAA
    This map shows the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone within the North Pacific Gyre.


    The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, known as SEAPLEX, traveled about 1,000 miles west of California in August 2009.

    A statement on Scripps' website said the scientists had "documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean."
    Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, SEAPLEX’s chief scientist, said that plastic had arrived in the ocean in such numbers in a "relatively short" period.
    Dec. 29, 2007: NBC's Kerry Sanders reports on a huge mass of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean that is killing marine life and growing larger each day.

    "Plastic only became widespread in late '40s and early '50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we've seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic," she said. "Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better."
    Jim Leichter / Scripps Institution of Oceanogra
    Researchers found fish larvae growing on pieces of plastic, such as the one above.


    Sea skaters -- relatives of pond water skaters -- normally lay their eggs on flotsam such as seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. The sharp rise in plastic waste had led to an increase in egg densities in the gyre area, the study found.
    "We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic," Goldstein said in a statement.
    She told BBC News that the addition of "hundreds of millions of hard surfaces" to the Pacific was "quite a profound change."
    Samples taken by the scientists showed how marine life, such as small velella pictured above, lives alongside pieces of plastic.


    "In the North Pacific, for example, there's no floating seaweed like there is in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. And we know that the animals, the plants and the microbes that live on hard surfaces are different to the ones that live floating around in the water," she added.
    A garbage patch has also been found in the Atlantic Ocean, lying a few hundreds miles off the North American coast from Cuba to Virginia.
    http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news...-100-fold?lite

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    What's the Geiger counter reads on that stuff? What king of super bugs are we going to get?

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    I've been reading about this for a couple of years now. It's heartbreaking. And, it continues to grow.

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    It is awful, no doubt, and I think the effects of the tsunami in Japan will make it even larger. Much of what was washed out to sea is now making its way across the Pacific.

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    No need to hide this.
    History does not long Entrust the care of Freedom, to the Weak or Timid!!!!! Dwight D. Eisenhower ~

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    If any fishing lures are in that mess, they belong to me.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Alias View Post
    If any fishing lures are in that mess, they belong to me.

    Setting out bait.....were ya?
    History does not long Entrust the care of Freedom, to the Weak or Timid!!!!! Dwight D. Eisenhower ~

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    Quote Originally Posted by MMC View Post
    Setting out bait.....were ya?
    I had my big gas guzzler boat out there taking all the fish I could hold. I sold 'em all for an amzing profit, so I bought a bigger boat. God Bless America.

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    Angry

    Another big ol' landfill floatin' inna ocean...

    Scientists Found a Second Giant Garbage Patch in the Pacific
    Jul 21, 2017 - As if one wasn't bad enough.
    Somewhere in the North Pacific, there's a giant floating patch of garbage thousands of miles wide. It contains millions of tons of plastic and is estimated to take up an area the size of Alaska. We've known about it for around 30 years, and scientists have struggled to develop a method to clean it up. And now, a group of researchers has discovered another one. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the North Pacific is the result of ocean currents called gyres. These gyres are circling currents that can trap particles floating in them and push them into a single area. Essentially, all the trash thrown into the North Pacific is brought to a single area off the coast of North America.

    But the Pacific Ocean has another gyre in the Southern hemisphere, and it behaves the same way. Recently, scientists exploring a remote island in the South Pacific found almost 20 tons of plastic washed up on a beach, and they began to suspect that the South Pacific had a garbage patch of its own. A recent expedition to the area appears to confirm that this new garbage patch does exist. The researchers found an area about a million square miles in size, bigger than the state of Texas, containing over a million tons of plastic.

    Most of this plastic is tiny, less than a millimeter in size. These "microplastics" are often worn down, broken apart, and eroded by ocean currents until they become microscopic in size. These microplastics can still kill large ocean animals, but they also pose a danger to smaller organisms too. This second garbage patch appears to be a relatively new phenomenon. An expedition to the area in 2011 picked up little trace of the patch, which means it's likely only formed in the past few years. With any luck, we can figure out how to get rid of it as quickly as we created it.

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...garbage-patch/

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    Lightbulb

    Krill can breakdown microplastics in ocean garbage...

    Researchers find krill can break down microplastics
    Tue, Mar 13, 2018 - OCEANS OF GARBAGE: Digestion of plastic into much smaller fragments does not necessarily help ease pollution, Australian researchers said in a paper
    A world-first study by Australian researchers has found that krill can digest certain forms of microplastic into smaller — but no less pervasive — fragments. The study, published in Nature Communications journal on Friday, found that Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, can break down 31.5 micron polyethylene balls into fragments less than 1 micron in diameter. The study was conducted in laboratory conditions with new plastics. The lead researcher, Amanda Dawson, who completed the study as part of her doctorate with Griffith University, said that it was likely that microplastics in the ocean would be even easier to digest because they had already been degraded by UV radiation. Within five days in a plastic-free environment, all plastics had left the krills’ systems, meaning that microplastics from krill would not accumulate in animals further up the food chain, such as whales.


    Researchers pouring krill back into the ocean from the Australian Antarctic Division’s krill aquarium in Hobart, Tasmania.

    The digested fragments were on average 78 percent smaller than the original fragments, with some up to 94 percent smaller. Unfortunately, Dawson said, krill were unlikely to provide a solution to the levels of plastics and microplastics polluting the oceans. “It’s not necessarily helping plastic pollution, it’s just changing it to make it easier for small animals to eat it,” she said. “It could be a new source of plastics for the deep ocean.” A study by Newcastle University in December last year found microplastics in the stomachs of deep-sea creatures from 11km deep trenches in the Pacific Ocean. Dawson said microplastics that had been digested by krill were also too small to be detected in most oceanic plastic surveys, meaning the level of microplastics in the ocean could be higher than currently assumed.

    Coauthor So Kawaguchi, a krill biologist from the Australian Antarctic Division, where the experiments were conducted, said the krill had effectively turned microplastics into nanoplastics. “It’s a new pathway for microplastics to interact with the ecosystem, and we need to learn more about how microplastics interact with the environment,” Kawaguchi said. Microplastics are fragments of less than 5 millimeter in diameter. Krill cannot consume anything greater than 2mm in diameter. “They are not going to be able to eat a drink bottle,” Dawson said. The plastics they do consume are broken up by the animal’s gastric mill, which Dawson said functioned like a mortar and pestle. “I would assume that other planktonic crustaceans should be able to do this as well, we just haven’t seen it yet in any laboratory studies,” she said.

    It is not clear whether fibrous microplastics, such as fishing line or threads from clothing, can be digested in the same manner. Fibrous microplastics made up a greater proportion of the microplastics encountered by krill in the wild, Dawson said.

    http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../13/2003689202

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