Title: FW: [globalnews] Largest Oil Spill in the World
From: "Alice Friedemann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2003 2:47 pm
Subject: Largest Oil Spill in the World
I had a disturbing experience at Cape Canaveral National Sea Shore
last month. I drove to the north end of the park, and walked south
along the beach towards the enormous towers of the Kennedy Space
Center, 11 miles away. On the left, the sparkling blue water was
punctuated with the tall white plumes of pelicans dive-bombing the
waves. On the right was Mosquito lagoon, one of the most beautiful
places in Florida.
I'd come to find Sea Beans. These are beautiful exotic seeds of
tropical plants from all over the world, with names like Hog-plum,
Hamburger Bean, and Moonflower
(http://www.seabean.com/guide/index.htm).
But what I found was plastic trash. Miles and miles of soda bottles,
plastic bags, milk jugs, plastic spoons, and the like. At the Ponce
Inlet Marine Science Center, the docent was sure most of it came from
party boats and cruises offshore. Case solved -– cruise ships have
been caught dumping their shit, literally, into the pristine waters
of Alaska. Not surprising to find out they're throwing trash
overboard as well.
My career as trash detective would have ended then if I hadn't seen
an ad in the paper for a lecture on "How plastic trash finds its way
into the ocean".
The problem turns out to be huge -- the plastic in the ocean could be
considered the largest oil spill in the world.
Between California and Asia there's ten million square miles of
plastic swirling in the slow rotation of the north pacific gyre, an
area larger than Africa. A huge mountain of air, heated over the
equator, creates the currents as it moves north. The garbage on this
marine merry-go-round spends 12 years completing one circle. About
half of the plastic made is close to the specific gravity of water,
and the half that sinks easily rises again when storms mix the water
up.
There's so much plastic in the Pacific gyre, that six times as much
plastic as zooplankton by weight was found there (Marine Pollution
Bulletin). Outside the gyres, the concentration is almost half that
amount – still awfully high.
Like diamonds, plastics are forever. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. It
takes even longer for the sun to break apart a piece of plastic in
the ocean than on land, because the water cools the plastic down.
Although it gets broken into smaller and smaller pieces, it reaches a
point where the molecular weight and tight chemical bonds prevent any
organism from breaking it down further.
Plastic facts
- One hundred billion pounds of pre-production plastic resin pellets
are produced every year in the US to create consumer plastics.
- These pellets, also known as nurdles, look just like fish eggs, and
are the most common plastic object found in the ocean. Clearly many
of them are escaping the production process.
- Only 3.3% of plastic is recycled, because reheating plastic reduces
its flexibility. Sixty-three pounds of plastic per person ends up in
landfills in the United States.
- Because plastic is lighter than sand, it may be eroding beaches
- Plastic concentrates chemicals and pollutants up to one million
times their concentration in the surrounding sea water. Many of
these chemicals are endocrine disruptors.
So – how are plastics getting into the ocean? About 20% comes from
activities at sea, especially when some of the 100 million containers
shipped every year get knocked off in storms. The remaining 80%
comes from the land.
Alice Friedemann, Oakland CA
Sources:
Lecture and material from the lecture given by Charles Moore,
Berkeley Public Library 11 Feb 2003
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Marine-Debris-Panel30oct02.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Synthetic-Sea-Moore.htm\
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Algalita-Ocean-Plastic22oct02.htm
And many of the links at:
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/ocean.htm
--------------------------------------------------------
U.S. News & World Report 4 NOV 2002
Trashing the Oceans by Thomas
An armada of plastic rides the waves, and sea creatures are suffering
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-
Plastic4nov02.htm
At Taco Bell on Main Street in Ventura, Calif., you can take out the
chalupa of your choice--Baja, Nacho Cheese, or Supreme, with ground
beef, chicken, or steak. But it will always come in a small plastic
shopping bag. The bags arrive preprinted from a factory in Asia--
usually. One brilliant summer morning in 2000, the small private
research vessel Alguita discovered a 10-mile-wide flotilla of the
disposable sacks, an estimated 6 million of them destined for Taco
Bells around the country, bobbing more than 1,000 miles west of the
Ventura store. "We were out in the middle of the Pacific, where you
would think the ocean would be pristine," recalls the Alguita's
captain, Charles Moore. "And instead, we get the Exxon Valdez of
plastic-bag spills."
Most plastic bags end up in landfills, part of the millions of tons
of plastic garbage Americans dump each year. But whether jettisoned
illegally by ships at sea, washed out from land during storms, or, as
in the case of the chalupa bags, accidentally lost overboard from
containerships, countless tons of plastic refuse end up drifting on
the high seas.
Lethal litter.
Many Americans know about the hazard posed by six-pack rings, the
plastic yokes that can grasp a seagull or otter's neck as tightly as
they do a soda can. But researchers are finding that plastic litter
doesn't just strangle wildlife or spoil the view. "Plastic is not
just an aesthetic problem," says marine biologist David Barnes of the
British Antarctic Survey. "It can actually change entire ecosystems.
The largest pieces of plastic--miles long discarded fishing nets and
lines-- take an obvious toll. These "ghost nets" snare and drown
thousands of seals, sea lions, and dolphins a year. Researchers have
also watched in horror as hungry turtles wolf down jellyfish-like
plastic bags and seabirds mistake old lighters and toothbrushes for
fish, choking when they try to regurgitate the trash for their
starving chicks. As Barnes is documenting, tiny marine animals riding
rafts of plastic trash are invading polar seas, while Japanese
researchers are finding high concentrations of deadly chemicals
clinging to floating, tapioca-size plastic pellets called "nurdles."
And Moore, back from a three-month North Pacific voyage last week, is
tracking it all and discovering that tiny fragments of plastic are
entering the food web right near its bottom.
A member of the prominent Los Angeles-area Hancock Oil family, Moore
is anything but a typical researcher. He grew up as an avid surfer
and sailor in a comfortable waterfront home in Long Beach and ran a
furniture restoration business. But in 1995, at the age of 48, Moore
sold his business, set up the Algalita Marine Research Foundation,
and designed a unique double-hulled sailing research vessel, the
Alguita. Both ship and captain found their true calling after a 1997
yacht race to Hawaii.
On his return voyage, Moore veered from the usual sea route and saw
an ocean he had never known. Every time he stepped out on
deck, "there were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and
fishing floats as far as I could see. Here I was in the middle of the
ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic." Ever
since, Moore has dedicated his time, and a small personal fortune, to
seeking it out. "It's an overlooked problem, and this guy is making a
really important contribution," says oceanographer Dale Kiefer of the
University of Southern California.
With little scientific training, Moore formed alliances with
professional scientists, including chemists, biologists, and a
private oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, himself a well-known
flotsam hunter. Ebbesmeyer's most famous case involved a 1990
containership spill that dumped 80,000 Nike running shoes into the
North Pacific. The errant runners washed up on beaches from British
Columbia to California, helping him trace the currents that carried
them.
The Alguita's mission started in earnest in 1999. Moore and his all-
volunteer crew--attracted by the chance for meaningful adventure and
Moore's reputation as an excellent chef--returned to the garbage-
strewn region he had happened on two years earlier and skimmed the
surface with fine collecting nets. Across hundreds of miles of ocean,
they counted roughly a million pieces of plastic per square mile,
almost all of it less than a few millimeters across.
Trash heap.
The Alguita was sampling water beneath a climate feature called the
North Pacific subtropical high--the big "H" on weather maps--that
protects Southern California's enviable weather by pushing storms
north or south. The H is the eye of a circle of currents thousands of
miles wide called the North Pacific gyre. The high's weak winds and
sluggish currents naturally collect flotsam, earning it the
unfortunate nickname of the "Eastern Garbage Patch." Similar wind and
current patterns exist in all the major oceans, and all presumably
suffer from similar contamination.
Because most plastics are lighter than seawater, they float on the
surface for years, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller
fragments--which often end up in the ocean's drifting, filter-feeding
animals, like jellyfish. Early in his voyages, Moore collected
baseball-size gelatinous animals called salps and found their
translucent tissues clogged with bits of monofilament fishing line
and nurdles (more romantically referred to as "mermaid tears" by
beachcombers). A hundred billion pounds of these pellets are produced
each year, to be formed into everything from cd cases to plastic
pipe. But each one is a perfect plankton's-eye-view replica of a fish
egg. "You rarely find any particles smaller than a millimeter in the
water," says Moore. "They're all in the jellies."
That's not likely to be good for the filter feeders or the things
that eat them, notes Moore, and not just because a meal of plastic
doesn't yield much nutrition. A 2001 paper by Japanese researchers
reported that plastic debris can act like a sponge for toxic
chemicals, soaking up a millionfold greater concentration of such
deadly compounds as pcbs and dde, a breakdown product of the
notorious insecticide ddt, than the surrounding seawater. That could
turn a bellyful of plastic from a mere stomachache to a toxic gut
bomb that can work its way through the food web.
Unhappy hunting.
In Moore's latest voyage to the garbage patch, he got a close-up view
of what happens when life meets floating garbage. The Alguita's crew
found plastic trash bobbing in a thick line from horizon to horizon--
everything from tiny particles to 5-inch-thick towing lines, Japanese
traffic cones, and yellow quart bottles of American crankcase
oil. "We followed the debris for more than a mile, and we never found
the end of it," Moore told U.S. News by satellite phone. The research
team had stumbled across what oceanographers call a Langmuir cell, a
wind-driven circulation pattern where two masses of water are pushed
together, forcing some of the water to sink where they meet; anything
that floats stays on the surface.
Normally that means living things. These convergences are favorite
hunting grounds of seabirds and other predators, which pick
zooplankton, fish eggs, jellyfish, and other delicacies out of the
long, frothy windrows. Alien-seeming gelatinous creatures usually
float just below, spinning fantastic webs of mucus to sieve out every
last particle. Not this time, says Moore. "We found all the refuse of
civilization, but there were no zooplankton at all." He's at a loss
to explain why.
The Alguita team did see albatrosses and tropic birds circling above
the line of trash. With little else to choose, they were apparently
eating plastic. The birds seemed to be picking and choosing "the reds
and pinks and browns. Anything that looks like shrimp," Moore says.
Earlier in the trip, the Alguita had visited the French Frigate
Shoals, off Hawaii, home to endangered monk seals and seabird
rookeries. In the birds' gullets, researchers found red plastic
particles.
Lines of trash like this one may also help explain the woes of the
monk seals, which are usually killed by large masses of nets, more
than any one fishing vessel is likely to lose or cut loose at a time.
The Alguita's crew plucked several of these net balls from the
Langmuir windrow. The converging currents evidently brought nets
together and tangled them into makeshift deathtraps as they rolled in
the sinking water.
Expect the trashing of the oceans to continue. An international
convention called MARPOL bans the dumping of plastics at sea, but
enforcement on the open ocean is nonexistent. Accidental losses are
forgiven, notes Moore, and shippers don't even have to report
them. "That means dogooders like me don't even get a chance to clean
up after the polluters," says Moore.
Rob Krebs of the American Plastics Council notes that people value
plastics for exactly what creates problems at sea: their durability.
Manufacturers are not to blame for the trash, he says. "The
responsibility is with the people who control the material, not those
who produce it." Moore agrees that greater efforts to prevent spills
will help. But, he adds, "there's no reason why a six-pack ring or a
peanut butter jar should have to last for 400 years." Manufacturers
have tried for years to perfect biodegradable packaging, and at least
one company, EarthShell, may finally be making some headway.
Government agencies like the National Park Service are already using
EarthShell's biodegradable plates and packaging, and hundreds of
McDonald's restaurants have experimented with its clamshell boxes.
Moore, meantime, says he'll keep hunting marine plastic as long as
his money holds out. After all, there is a link between his own
advantages and the plastic flotsam he has been tracking. Oil made his
grandfather's fortune--and oil is the raw material for most plastics
manufacturing. "In a way, part of all this is remediation for the
consequences of my grandfather's life," he says. "I guess maybe I
need to make amends."
