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Plastic in 'Pacific Garbage Patch' has wrought profound changes to environment
By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
May 9th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
May 9th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" floating in the Pacific Ocean has
increased 100-fold during the past 40 years, causing "profound" changes
to the marine environment, according to a new study. In particular,
plastic refuse is everywhere apparent, which provides a home for a
different type of insect.
Researchers say this has implications for other animals, the sea skaters' predators, such as crabs and their food, which are chiefly plankton and fish eggs. A previous study that found nine percent of fish had plastic waste in their stomachs.
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," approximately the size of Texas was first created when plastic waste found its way into the sea and is then swept into one area, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone.
According to the Scripps' Web site, 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.
"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."
Relatives of pond water skaters, sea 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.
With the introduction of "hundreds of millions of hard surfaces" in the Pacific Ocean, this leads to "quite a profound change.
"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.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer says that the only solution was to switch to using biodegradable plastic and let the plastic gradually disperse.
"We can't clean it up. It's just too big. You'd have to have the entire U.S. Navy out there, round the clock, continuously towing little nets. And it's produced so fast, they wouldn't be able to keep up," he said.
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