The Trip to the Plastic Vortex
The North Pacific Gyre, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the Plastic Vortex, whatever you call it, it is ugly and frightening! Miles of toxic, swirling decomposing human junk. We all need a call to action! TED prize winner Sylvia Earle shares her views on why we all need to care now:
Paul Rogers of Mercury News writes yesterday about the recent expedition to the giant plastic garbage patch. This research collaboration was launched a month ago when two ships embarked to study the site. Departing to the toxic site were the New Horizon, a 170-foot vessel, sent by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the Kaisei, whose name means “ocean planet” in Japanese, sent by Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito nonprofit that privately raised $500,000 for the voyage. Both ships met at sea, collected water samples and took thousands of readings and photographs. Their goal: to study the patch’s size, how the plastic affects wildlife and whether it may be possible to one day clean up some of it.
Rogers writes, “Because the plastic pieces contain toxic chemicals — and are believed to be able to absorb now-banned chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, which can persist in the environment for decades — state toxicologists have taken hundreds of the objects, along with more than 300 fish, to an environmental chemistry lab in Berkeley to see if any chemicals are moving up the food chain.”
“Every day, every night, we’d pull up samples and pour the water through a sieve. It would be completely clogged with tiny pieces of plastic,” said Margy Gassel, a research scientist with the California Environmental Protection Agency. “It was so disturbing.”
The research was the most extensive look yet at the garbage patch, and its collection of mostly plastic debris located 1,000 miles north of Hawaii. The reports from theresearcher’s work will be out in several months -- but you know in the meantime what we can all do and that is “Do the Blue” and eliminate as much plastic from your life as possible!
Help Stop Marine Plastic Pollution and Animal Bycatch
