Image courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Foundation
The UNEP reports that today 80 percent of all marine debris that washes ashore—such as trash and toxic matter—originally comes from shore-based activities that could have begun with innocent fun, such as picnics and beach outings and the like. Farther inland, rivers and streams carry trash to the sea. Marah Hardt, a research fellow at the Blue Ocean Institute on Long Island in New York, says most people have no clue about their effect on ocean life because they can’t see it. “The ocean is way out there, they think,” she says. Meanwhile, their garbage disposals, drainpipes, and sewers can lead directly to it. Factories dump. Air pollution seeps. This is how the oceans become contaminated.
Solutions offered by the public range from thoughtful to wacky: “Why couldn’t it be possible to collect the larger pieces of trash by skimming the most polluted concentrations with troll nets and attaching them to helicopters that would then deposit them into the path of the ongoing lava flow of Kilauea to be consumed and incorporated into new rock?” one person asked in a blog comment. Other ideas include vacuuming the sea and converting the plastic into an alternative energy source (plastics are made from petroleum).
“We get about one suggestion a week,” says Anna Cummins, an Alguita crew member and education adviser at Algalita.
Moore says the only solution is to prevent more debris from entering the ocean; it is futile to try to clean out whatever exists there now. And without changing our habits, the garbage patch will only continue to grow.
Alexandra Cousteau, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and the granddaughter of the famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, believes awareness and education are the keys to ocean preservation. She and her brother, Philippe, use the media and speak about their environmental experiences to educate people about the importance of protecting the oceans and freshwater resources. Cousteau reminds me that we are all indelibly linked to the oceans. “We live on a water planet,” she says. “Water is life.” Pollution, therefore, is unacceptable, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, anathema.
The samples of trash and marine life gathered during Alguita’s winter voyage—buckets of plastic, garbage, and algaelike organisms—are still being evaluated and lab tested, and the results will be available this summer. But Moore tells me the major finding, in his mind, was the discovery of the further accumulation of trash outside the garbage patch itself, near the international date line—a higher-density collection of waste making its way to the patch. “You can now make a new hypothesis that all food in the ocean contains plastic,” he says. The evaluation of particle ratios—the measure of plastic to organic matter—inside and outside of the patch may bear that out. So may analysis of seawater for the chemical signature plastic leaves behind.
Meanwhile, Moore has plans to go farther and test new waters sometime this fall or early next year. If he can prove that the travesty of plastic pervasiveness in the ocean is worsening (by tracking the amount of plastic per square mile of ocean, as this last voyage did) and that it has an impact on more of the various types of ocean life, even perhaps on the carbon sequestration process that the oceans offer, then international policy might finally begin to address the issue of trash in our seas. That, anyway, is the hope of all his fieldwork.
I remember sailing miles offshore with Captain Moore and his crew in the days before their trek, taking in the sight of two whales spouting and playing, wondering just how much plastic they had ingested.
It made me think how tragic it is that now when we say “blue ocean,” we may be talking about it not so much in the sense of its color but in the sense that it is sad. And for that we have to take more responsibility.
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