My project and the project being tackled by System 001/Wilson are centered around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Famous in the media as the "trash island in the Pacific", the garbage patch is not an island! Though this is not news to those that are intimately familiar with the details of the region, it isn't common knowledge, and since I started this blog to share what it's like to be a scientist, I thought I'd start by debunking the pop-culture explanation for the area I'm studying! Conveniently, The Ocean Cleanup (and collaborating groups) published a paper in Scientific Nature Reports on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (from here on I'm going to call it the GPGP okay? perfect, thanks for the input)! If you want to read the paper, you can access it here. Otherwise I'm going to summarize and focus on some of the takeaways that are important to know moving forward. This image is taken from Lebreton et al., 2018 and shows the concentrations of mass in the GPGP. So as you can see, the estimation of the GPGP is based on concentrations per area of the surface waters, which at the maximum is 100 kg (or around 200 pounds) per square kilometer (1km is almost half a mile). So I guess to the untrained eye estimating concentration of debris by surface area could LOOK like a trash island, this really is just not what's occurring. What we actually end up with is a really gross slush/soup of plastic that not only occur at the surface, but permeate the water column as well - extending down and sometimes sinking and settling on the ocean floor or getting taken up into the food chain. The paper predicts that there is an estimated 79,000 tons of plastic floating in 1.6 million square kilometers. In addition to this, the paper estimates that there are 1.8 TRILLION INDIVIDUAL pieces of plastic floating in this area!!! That's CRAZY! Though this is the largest of the 5 major ocean gyres THERE'S FOUR OTHER GYRES THAT ALL HAVE MORE GARBAGE FLOATING IN THEM!!! THIS IS THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM WE ARE TRYING TO TACKLE! Well this problem is isolated isn't it? If The Ocean Cleanup succeeds in getting the plastic out of the ocean that solves it right? WRONG! In conducting my literature review for my thesis I've found some alarming numbers in papers that I really want to take the time to share. One paper (Geyer et al., 2017) found that 79% of all plastic ever made has accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. 79%?!?!?! ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?! I thought it was recyclable??? But when it's sitting in a landfill it is taking up valuable space AND also poses the potential for leaching toxins into our natural environment (thanks AP Environmental Science)! But the problem continues as we continue to explore the problem. Some of the plastic that enters the oceans are buoyant and float along the surface to reach the gyre - creating the GPGP. We have seen on multiple occasions (Gregory, 2009; Rech et al., 2016) that these floating "rafts" of plastic offer surfaces for marine organisms to hitch a ride to different parts of the ocean. These rafts can introduce non-native/invasive species to new environments, which can allow them to out-compete natural and native species and can potentially change the ecosystems where they land. There is a slew of other problems associated with marine plastic, I hope this has been a good opening case for why we should do something about marine plastics. The Ocean Cleanup, Debris Free Ocean, and 4Ocean, are all organizations dedicated to the removal of plastic from the oceans. In addition to removing the plastic, we need to prevent it's arrival at sea in the first place. With both of these tactics, I believe that we can begin to move forward towards oceans that are plastic free. :D (I couldn't end on a downer note so let's try to be positive). I cited a few papers in my discussion, and I've included a works cited here because I cannot explain how frustrated I get after reading articles in newspapers and such that make claims and give me nothing to back them up so below please find my works cited (all from peer-reviewed scientific journals). If you want to go and read them and dispute my claims feel free - it's all part of the process! I think you should be able to find them via Google Scholar and if you can't, then feel free to send me an email and I'll send you a PDF. At any rate, if you don't take anything else away from this post: IT'S NOT A TRASH ISLAND PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! Works Cited
1 Comment
|
AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
All
Archives
March 2021
|