Latest
- Champagne for my real friends; real pain for my sh...
- Cities I Visited in 2007
- The First New York Times Article to Bring Tears to...
- Owning a sailboat is NOT expensive unless you want...
- This is me playing guitar in my college band circa...
- My Tour of the Maker's Mark Whiskey Distillery
- A Fireplace Makes Winter Worth Living
- People don't write like they used to.
- Today's my birthday, let's fire some shotguns!
- Virat Shukla is the Closest to Musical Genius I've...
Best of
Archives
- July 2004
- November 2004
- December 2004
- January 2005
- February 2005
- March 2005
- April 2005
- May 2005
- June 2005
- July 2005
- August 2005
- September 2005
- October 2005
- November 2005
- December 2005
- January 2006
- February 2006
- March 2006
- April 2006
- May 2006
- June 2006
- July 2006
- August 2006
- September 2006
- October 2006
- November 2006
- December 2006
- January 2007
- February 2007
- March 2007
- April 2007
- May 2007
- June 2007
- July 2007
- August 2007
- September 2007
- October 2007
- November 2007
- December 2007
- January 2008
- February 2008
- March 2008
- April 2008
- May 2008
- June 2008
- July 2008
- August 2008
- September 2008
- October 2008
- November 2008
- December 2008
- January 2009
- February 2009
- March 2009
- April 2009
- May 2009
- June 2009
- July 2009
- August 2009
- September 2009
- October 2009
- November 2009
- December 2009
- January 2010
- February 2010
- March 2010
- April 2010
- June 2010
- July 2010
- September 2010
- October 2010
- November 2010
- December 2010
- January 2011
- February 2011
- March 2011
- June 2011
- July 2011
- August 2011
- September 2011
- November 2011
- July 2012
- October 2012
Blanketing opinions that I'll probably regret soon.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Flotsam & Jetsam & the Pacific Trash Gyre
The Sailing Anarchy Forum has generated an interesting conversation about things people have seen floating on various waterways while sailing. The discussion was prompted by this article about a slowly swirling mass of tiny plastic trash that's twice the size of Britain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Below, I've listed the things the sailors wrote they'd seen floating around the world:
"I used to sail as an engineer aboard containerships and tankers, and I was constantly amazed at the shit that was perfectly legal to dump overboard. We were transporting live cattle from Hawaii to Oakland, CA and every once in a while, espically in rough seas, one or 2 of the cows would die. The cattle were basically packed shoulder to shoulder in these special cattle containers, and the ones on the ends would sometimes get crushed to death from the pitching motion of the ship. In order to avoid spreading disease to the other cattle, the deck crew had to winch the dead cattle overboard.
We used to dispose of anything that was considered ‘biodegradable’ overboard - that included massive hunks of steel trash, wooden packing material and dunnage, empty 55 gallon drums (no longer legal since they have oil residue in them, however it was permitted as recent as 10 years ago), food waste, unruly Mass Maritime cadets, anything except plastic. And yes, that included the aforementioned 6 foot flourescent light bulbs, and they wouldnt always break."
Below, I've listed the things the sailors wrote they'd seen floating around the world:
- "20' inflatable swim pad complete with a slide"
- "Dead body"
- "Water skiied into a dead cow. Stunk sooooo bad I have never been out of the water quicker - swear to god I could still smell it a month later."
- "20 or so years ago i worked a passage across the pacific on a container ship. When i was on deck and just gazing at the ocean the 1st thing i was likely to see was discarded evian bottles."
- " On three different occasions, I had to yield to moose. One was about 2 miles offshore. They are excellent swimmers"
- "100 miles west of Bermuda - a refrigerator."
- "NY Harbor - What looked like Archie Bunker's couch came floating by."
- "Northern Chesapeake Bay - A barge load of telephone poles. At night (we hit a few, they are invisible in the dark)"
- "A dead guy. In the Sausalito marina, submerged but kept afloat by his foam-lined laptop case. Some guys on a sailboat were heading out and saw the floating case. They snagged it with a boathook, and discovered the attached victim. They brought him back to the dock, where I helped the police pull him out."
- " A tiger-striped full body pillow still in its plastic wrapper."
- "10's of thousands of mylar balloons. On some passages it starts out as a game to snag them out of the drink with a net, but after a while you realise that it's a waste of time as there are probably millions of those hideous friggin mylar plastic balloons floating on the ocean. I've never bought one, and I never will."
- "A couple of dead bodies and compressed-gas tanks of various sizes."
- "A very large and rather ramshackle toolshed (30 feet long or so), lashed to a set of equally large logs. South of Prince Rupert, 1982 ish. I'm guessing that it floated down the Skeena River."
- "A dead moose. Racing to Castine up East Penobscot bay. The thing must have been dead awhile as it was floating pretty high. It was huge."
- "Dead deer, a big screen TV, a sectional couch, a dead dog with a tennis ball right in front of it, too many telephone poles to count"
- "A 6ft flourescent light bulb, 160nm offshore."
- "A dead cow in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. As we approached we were upwind, but once we passed it the smell was incredible. Damn that shit smelled."
- "All kindsa crazy shit out in the Ches Bay after Hurricane Isabel.. large kitchen appliances, a coke machine, several large (100gal) propane tanks, the light cluster from atop a police car... the list could go on"
- "Dead body - jumper - 'fresh' - hit the water under the Forth Road bridge within spitting distance of a bunch of kids in sailing lessons"
- "Dead cow in tri cities washington. all bloated. we hit it on the starboard hull and it rolled the length. tongue hanging out, eyes bulging."
- "Dead body - Jumper off the Aurora bridge."
- "238 packs of Marlboro cigarettes in a box."
- " A plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag, in the middle of the Pacific, about as far from land as you can be."
- " One dead cow. One dead dog."
- " A German Shepard puppy in a plastic bag."
- "Cuban rafts (spooky) off Eastern Shore of VA coast"
- " A dead cow up near Eastport Maine. At first thought it was an unmarked rock."
- "1 dead body, 1 plane that killed said body, 1 cutoff head floating in Miami bay"
- "Saw a mostly submerged container just SW of Conception once. It was dawn or dusk (long race.. don't recall), pretty calm and it looked like we were coming up on the obelisk from the 2001 Space Odessey movie."
- "In SF bay once we saw a bunch of ballons tied together floating, we grabed them with the boat hook and put them in the cockpit, my buddy started to stomp on them to pop them, we found notes inside saying 'to grandpa in heaven, we love you'. my buddy felt bad about thrashing the ballons after that."
- "In the Hudson River near Tappazee I saw a Barn Door. Yep it was painted Red had the white trim and about 12 feet by 20 feet in size. Right off the farm."
- "An airplane. Rowing back from the mooring I saw what looked like a submerged capsized canoe. Getting closer it turned out to be two canoes - WTF? Closer still it was the floats of a capsized and sunk seaplane. I swam down to take a look and make sure no one was still in it."
"I used to sail as an engineer aboard containerships and tankers, and I was constantly amazed at the shit that was perfectly legal to dump overboard. We were transporting live cattle from Hawaii to Oakland, CA and every once in a while, espically in rough seas, one or 2 of the cows would die. The cattle were basically packed shoulder to shoulder in these special cattle containers, and the ones on the ends would sometimes get crushed to death from the pitching motion of the ship. In order to avoid spreading disease to the other cattle, the deck crew had to winch the dead cattle overboard.
We used to dispose of anything that was considered ‘biodegradable’ overboard - that included massive hunks of steel trash, wooden packing material and dunnage, empty 55 gallon drums (no longer legal since they have oil residue in them, however it was permitted as recent as 10 years ago), food waste, unruly Mass Maritime cadets, anything except plastic. And yes, that included the aforementioned 6 foot flourescent light bulbs, and they wouldnt always break."
Comments:
<< Home
My brother is a biologist on Midway Atoll and sees piles of plastic garbage wash ashore every day.
The LA Times won a 2007 Pulitzer for a series of stories about the world's distressed oceans, including "Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas".
The LA Times won a 2007 Pulitzer for a series of stories about the world's distressed oceans, including "Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas".
I was more interested in the original story, so I looked into that. There are tons of stories which verify the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches but I cannot for the life of me find a single picture. If such a huge thing of trash exists, why hasn't someone taken a picture of it from the deck of their boat? If it really is twice the size of Texas as some internet rehashers claim or as large as Britain, why aren't there satellite photos? I consider myself environmental friendly and am fully willing to beleive there is a continent of trash out there, but since I can't find a picture in this era of wide spread multi-media, some minor doubts are trickling into my brain. Can anyone get visual confirmation?
Shrubs,
from theoystersgarter.com
"When I learned of the trash gyre, I was equally skeptical, due to common misconceptions that get perpetuated in mainstream media articles. The most common misconception is that the trash pile is like an island, or a dense pile like this one in San Diego Harbor. It’s not packed in as tight as that - it’s more like a dense collection of tiny floating pieces of plastic, most of which are not on the surface. A big container ship or naval vessel going through there would probably not notice much out of the ordinary - after all, there is some degree of plastic trash floating on the surface all over the world.
To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Thanks, Barbeau lab! SIO power!) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce - lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.
Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up - see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents - plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like this one in the NW Hawaiian Islands.
For this reason, the trash gyre would be very, very hard to clean up. The plastic is so small, and so scattered, that it would take high-intensity trawling similar to that for shrimp. And shrimp trawling kills 10 pounds of non-targeted life (sharks, turtles, fish, you name it) for every pound of shrimp gathered. (Yes, Forrest Gump lied to you - for some reason they didn’t want drowned turtles next to Tom Hank’s angelic self.) The mortality caused by trying to remove all the trash in the gyre would probably be similar. We’re just going to have to live with it and try to prevent it from getting any bigger."
from theoystersgarter.com
"When I learned of the trash gyre, I was equally skeptical, due to common misconceptions that get perpetuated in mainstream media articles. The most common misconception is that the trash pile is like an island, or a dense pile like this one in San Diego Harbor. It’s not packed in as tight as that - it’s more like a dense collection of tiny floating pieces of plastic, most of which are not on the surface. A big container ship or naval vessel going through there would probably not notice much out of the ordinary - after all, there is some degree of plastic trash floating on the surface all over the world.
To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Thanks, Barbeau lab! SIO power!) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce - lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.
Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up - see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents - plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like this one in the NW Hawaiian Islands.
For this reason, the trash gyre would be very, very hard to clean up. The plastic is so small, and so scattered, that it would take high-intensity trawling similar to that for shrimp. And shrimp trawling kills 10 pounds of non-targeted life (sharks, turtles, fish, you name it) for every pound of shrimp gathered. (Yes, Forrest Gump lied to you - for some reason they didn’t want drowned turtles next to Tom Hank’s angelic self.) The mortality caused by trying to remove all the trash in the gyre would probably be similar. We’re just going to have to live with it and try to prevent it from getting any bigger."
Cool, thanks LB. That certainly explains it. A great example of how the internet tends to skew facts.
It still does not lessen my disgust of the situation or feeling powerless to do anything.
Post a Comment
It still does not lessen my disgust of the situation or feeling powerless to do anything.
<< Home
Web Counters