Noise Pollution Becoming a Bigger Problem in the World’s Oceans

We’ve already sullied the oceans of the world with oil, chemicals and trash.  Now, you can add another type of pollution to that list – a type that cleanup crews, no matter how passionate, can’t control. Noise levels in the oceans have reached such high levels that whales, dolphins and other marine mammals can’t properly communicate.  It’s so bad, that some species of whales have actually died because of it.

From Mental Floss:

It’s not so much that the noise we humans produce underwater is greater than what we produce on land, but that creatures of the sea are so much more sensitive to it. Baleen whales emit low-frequency calls that can travel a thousand miles in water — an essential kind of long-distance calling plan for an animal whose kind are far more sparsely distributed than before commercial whaling took hold. Other kinds of whales and dolphins use high-frequency clicks to locate prey, and sound is important to all marine mammals “in ways that are clearly important to their survival, though not completely understood,” according to the BBC.

And it’s not just high-energy sonar from naval operations that’s drowning them out — the engines and propellers of large ships, whose movements across the open ocean are mostly unrestricted, can be a major problem, as well as the seismic blasts associated with offshore drilling operations (drill, Willy, drill!).

This video shows the effect of sonar on whales:

Can we do anything right, when it comes to our influence on our surroundings? Humans really are like a virus, spreading across the earth and negatively affecting nearly everything we come into contact with.  We really haven’t thought beyond our immediate needs, and how our actions affect the world.

Link [Mental Floss]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Ocean Dead Zones Might be Worse Than Originally Thought

Well, you didn’t think things were actually better than we initially thought, did you? Frighteningly, dead zones in oceans around the world – which are oxygen-starved areas that can’t support most life – are greater than originally thought in coastal areas that support fishing industries. More than 400 dead zones have formed along continental coastlines since the mid-20th century.  They occur when fertilizer pollution causes algal blooms, whose decomposition feeds oxygen-consuming bacteria.

From Wired Science:

These so-called hypoxic regions now cover an area roughly equivalent in size to Oregon. Compared to Earth’s total ocean area, that’s relatively small, but they’re grouped in places critical to commercial fishing. They’re also spreading, in both size and frequency: Since the 1960s, the number of hypoxic areas has doubled every 10 years.

And as significant as the problem is, it’s based on what may be outdated, overly permissive standards. The new study is a review of nearly 900 studies of 206 ocean floor-dwelling species, and suggests that the level of oxygen considered hypoxic needs to be raised.

“These results imply that the number and area of coastal ecosystems affected by hypoxia and the future extent of hypoxia impacts on marine life have been generally underestimated,” write Carlos Duarte and Raquel Vaquer-Sunyer of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies. The paper was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Duarte and Vaquer-Sunyer believe that we need to replace the outdated oxygen baseline, set in 1983, to 4.6 milligrams per liter, if not higher, in order to preserve the biodiversity of bottom-dwellers.  This benchmark would probably double the number of hypoxic zones, or at least increase it by 100.

Robert Diaz, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science biologist who has been studying dead zones since 1995, says “Everything is pointing towards a more desperate situation in all aquatic systems, freshwater and marine.  That’s pretty clear.  People should be worried, all over the world.”

We sure have managed to mess things up, haven’t we?

Link [Wired Science]

The Secrets of Trash on Nuclear Aircraft Carriers

What’s life like on a nuclear aircraft carrier?  That’s what 10-part PBS series ‘Carrier’ aims to find out.  Filmed aboard the USS Nimitz, Carrier follows a core group of personnel living and working on the carrier.  The average age of the crewmen is 19, and many of the jobs are far from glamorous.  One segment that caught our eye focused on the trash processing department.  For anyone not already familiar with the practice of dumping at sea, it’s shocking.  Check it out starting at 10:40 below.

In the clip, Captain Ted Branch says, “The Navy has always been a very good steward of our environment. You’ll find that when compared to the civilian cruise liner industry, we are far more environmentally friendly than those types of ships.”  Another unidentified sailor says, “We don’t dump anything that, like, could contaminate the water or anything, everything we dump is like regular cans or food that we don’t eat.”

That doesn’t make it any easier to watch as the bags of trash slide down the chute and out into the open water, adding to the already serious problem of pollution in our oceans.  Everything but plastic gets thrown over the side of the ship.

Even better, another sailor talks about seeing protesters from Greenpeace and how absurd he thinks it is.  “There’s absolutely no merit to what they have to say.  To me, it’s almost like the KKK – they’re real fired up about something that makes no damn sense at all.”  Amazing.

Continue watching for some interesting tidbits abut the nuclear reactor and the people who work in it, who are described by one woman as “the trenchcoat people, the weird ones.”

Link [Hulu]

UK Fishermen Dump Catch Overboard to Make More Money

The European Union put fishing quotas in place for a reason: to prevent the kind of overfishing that experts warn could lead to mass extinction of marine life in the coming decades. But, European fishermen aren’t pleased with the quotas because they limit profit possibilities. So to get around that, they’re doing something pretty horrifying: dumping tons of perfectly good dead fish back into the water. Fish that should never have been caught in the first place.

Recently, the Norwegian Coast Guard shot video of UK fishermen doing just this, and the sight of such wastefulness (a whopping 5 tons of dead fish) has shocked many people who didn’t realize the extent of what was going on. Check it out at The Guardian.

From The Guardian’s Environment blog:

The practice is legal, as the EU only sets quotas for fish landed at ports, not what is actually caught at sea. In this case, it appears the fishermen were discarding low-value small (but legal) fish in order to fill their quota with higher-value big fish.

But the wasteful consequences of Europe’s fisheries policies, though well-known, are rather abstract to most people - it all happens a long way out at sea. And that’s the power of the video. At the start, a stream of dead, silvery fish slip down a chute and into the water. It goes on. And on. Seagulls gather to snap up a free lunch.

But this is apparently not rapid enough. So the men start dumping whole boxfuls of their catch over the side. And then another load comes up from the hold, and so on.

What an incredible waste, and a slap in the face to conservationists who are working so hard to maintain sustainable numbers of fish in our oceans. WTF. This is incredible disrespect and disregard not just for the fish but the future of humanity. What’s going to happen when our oceans are overfished to the point of irreparably damaging the delicately balanced ocean ecosystems?

Learn more about the problem of overfishing by reading the article ‘More Species Considered Overfished’ at the Florida Museum of Natural History website.

Link [The Guardian]

The Impossible Task of Cutting Plastic Out of Your Life

Image via Algalita Marine Research Foundation

Plastic is a cancer on the environment and yet we just can’t get enough of it. Just try to get through one day without plastic – it’s impossible. Your shampoo is in a plastic bottle. Your car has plastic all over the interior. Open your fridge door – plastic. Turn on a light – plastic. Brush your teeth, have safe sex, wear a Hawaiian shirt – plastic, plastic and more plastic.

Though I was always aware of plastic being problematic for the environment, I never considered trying to dramatically reduce my use of it until I had a wake-up call a few months back. After discovering that I had several health problems related to high levels of estrogen, a female hormone, I started doing some research and learned about the connection between hormones like estrogen and compounds found in plastic, such as Bisphenol A (BPA). Tests have shown BPA to be an endocrine disrupter, and it’s linked to health issues like breast cancer, prostate cancer, infertility, early onset of puberty and insulin resistance. BPA is found in plastic water bottles, reusable food containers, baby bottles and canned food liners, among many other items.

That led me to examine how much plastic I’ve really been using on a daily basis. Once you start thinking about how much plastic is in your life, it can be overwhelming. It’s everywhere, and health effects are far from the only dangers of the petroleum-based material. From the raw materials used to create it to where it ends up when we no longer want it, plastic has an incredibly large, negative footprint on the earth. Cradle to Cradle it’s not.

Plastic begins its life as petroleum, which is drilled and transported to refineries. Then the crude oil and natural gas is refined into ethane, propane and thousands of other petrochemical products. Ethane and propane are “cracked” into ethylene and propylene using high-temperature furnaces, and then a catalyst is combined with them in a reactor, resulting in what’s called ‘fluff’ – powdered polymers. The fluff is combined with additives in a blender, fed into an extruder where it’s melted, allowed to cool and then fed to a pelletizer that cuts it into small pellets. The pellets are shipped to manufacturers who then process it into various products (Source: ReachOutMichigan.org).

As you can see, the production of plastic is yet another way in which we’re dependent on foreign oil, and oil drilling is hard on the environment. Plastic also clogs our landfills. It can take 200 to 400 years to degrade, and only 3% of plastic waste is currently recycled, partially due to the fact that facilities to recycle most types of plastic simply don’t exist in most cities (Source: Learner.org). Consumers have little choice but to throw their plastic waste in the trash.

Ocean Gyres: The Pacific Gyre is top center. Image via Wikimedia Commons

As if that weren’t bad enough, then there’s the plastic that ends up in our oceans. The swirling vortex of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is a prime example of how our love affair with plastic is damaging the environment. The trash gyre takes up an astonishingly large area of the Pacific Ocean – twice the surface area of the continental United States. It’s essentially the world’s largest garbage dump, and it’s held in place by swirling underwater currents. It stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the northern Pacific nearly as far as Japan. Researchers have called it ‘plastic soup’, and includes everything from footballs and kayaks to children’s toys and shopping bags.

Plastic is believed to account for 90% of the trash in oceans, and it’s been known to kill marine life. The UN Environment Program estimates that plastic debris causes the death of more than 1 million seabirds each year, along with 100,000 marine mammals. Entanglement or ingestion of plastics have been known to cause death or suffering to at least 267 different species including turtles, seabirds, seals, sea lions, whales and fish.

Motivated by all of this knowledge, I set out to reduce the amount of plastic that I used in my daily life as much as possible. It didn’t take long to discover that cutting plastic out of your life in this day and age is virtually impossible. You’d have to totally change practically every facet of your life in order to avoid it. I began my quest to reduce my plastic use mainly concerned with plastics that come into contact with my food and drinks, as well as the products I apply directly to my skin, like lotion. It wasn’t too hard to replace my food containers and cups with all glass and ceramic, but then I started thinking about all of the plastic that surrounds me every day and how hard it would be to totally avoid it.

One thing I realized early on is that attempting to avoid plastic can either be really cheap or really expensive. If you go the cheap route, you’re bound to be living a pretty primitive existence, because finding alternatives to plastic for everyday items isn’t always possible. If you try to replace everything you own that’s made with plastic, you’re going to get frustrated fast because often, alternatives just aren’t out there.

You can get wooden or cloth kids toys instead of plastic, replace your toothbrush with a wooden one, buy staples in bulk (and use glass containers to house the items), only wear natural fabrics and replace cheap fixtures around your house with vintage glass or ceramic. But, you’ll have to forgo sunglasses, electronics and those little plastic pumps on your liquid hand soap. Forget medical or dental work - plastic abounds. Want to paint your house? The paint cans are plastic. Switching to tap water instead of bottled? You’ll have to drink it straight from the faucet, because filters are encased in plastic. Better switch to an entirely whole foods diet, because one stroll through the grocery store will show you that most items are encased in plastic bottles, bags, wrap or mesh.

Christine Jeavans with some of her plastic purchases – Image via BBC News

One woman in the UK is attempting to go without plastic for the entire month of August, and will be documenting her journey on the BBC News website. Christine Jeavans has resolved not to purchase anything that contains plastic or is packaged in plastic, and in preparation for this, she has kept all of the plastic she used in the previous month – totaling 603 items. Included in that total were 67 food packaging bags and films, 13 yogurt cups, 10 milk bottles and 120 disposable diapers. Once faced with all of this plastic, Chris was more resolved than ever to change her lifestyle. She’ll be updating her blog with her progress throughout the month.

I’m still sorting through my own attempts to reduce the amount of plastic I use, with mixed results – but hoping to do better going forward. While I can’t yet replace all of the plastic items in my home with longer-lasting, safer alternatives, I will definitely be far more conscious of what I purchase in the future. I’m already avoiding food with unnecessary packaging and thinking about where each item I purchase will end up when I’m done with it.

Luckily, the world at large is beginning to wake up from our decades-long plastic nightmare. Many new companies are offering plant-based packaging that breaks down when composted. Biodegradable packaging can be seen on everything from take-out containers to personal care products, and biodegradable options are available for items like trash bags and packaging tape.

There’s no doubt that plastic has revolutionized the way we live, and greatly sped up the advancement of modern civilization. But, times are once again a-changin’ – and we’ve got to find a better way. We’re a long way away from completely cutting plastic out of our lives – and it may never happen. But with the green revolution fueling sustainable technology like never before, we’re sure to see more ways that we can cut back.

Perhaps more companies will soon discover the merits of the Cradle to Cradle design philosophy, and we’ll soon have a wealth of materials that are even better than plastic that don’t harm the earth. And perhaps we can all be a little more conscious about the life cycle of every item we purchase – especially plastic – for our health and for the earth.

Wooden ‘Islands’ Allow Beachgoers to Enjoy Rocky Coast

Architect Vincent Guallart has come up with a way to access jagged, rocky oceanfront property that’s low impact and quite beautiful.  These hexagonal wooden ‘islands’ were built along a rough coast in Spain to allow locals to enjoy the beach comfortably without any major construction.  Guallart says they allow sunbathers and swimmers to enjoy a ‘previously nonexistent platform’.

Guallart is known for edgy, eye-catching designs, like this concept for the centerpiece of Polish city Wroclaw’s bid to host Expo 2012, a World’s Fair.

Link [TrendHunter] + [Guallart]

Fisherman Returning to Use of Sails as Fuel Costs Rise

Commercial fishermen are going back to the good old days of free fuel in response to the rising costs of diesel. By free fuel, of course, I mean wind power – they’re outfitting their boats with auxiliary sails to cut the amount of diesel they go through. Soon, however, they won’t have to rig their ships – a new generation of vessels is being developed that will rely almost completely on sails.

From The Telegraph:

Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said a number of skippers were now using sail power to help them travel the long distances between port and their fishing grounds.

“Skippers are putting on foresails while steaming to fishing grounds offshore,” he said. “The whole cost structure of the industry has shifted so dramatically as a result of fuel price rises, and in response, vessels are looking at what they can do to reduce costs.

“Fleets are going to have to find ways of reducing fuel dependency. Everyone is looking for the optimum steaming speed and people are looking at a whole range of measures, including sail.”

Auxiliary sails were common until the 1980s, when engines became more powerful and fuel was plentiful and cheap. One fisherman interviewed for this article said that with his auxiliary sails, engine revolutions were reduced from 1300 to 900 on a 3-hour trip, and they still made the same speed.

It’s pretty awesome that fisherman are going back to wind power – I wonder if pirates will soon do the same. Hey, a bottom line’s a bottom line.

Link [The Telegraph]
Photo credit: Flickr user mikebaird

Vancouver Residents Save Century-Old Lobster from the Pot

Lobsters – those poor little ‘sea bugs’ that so many people just can’t get enough of.  I remember cringing in horror as a child when my seafood-loving New England family would throw the poor things into the pots, knowing they were still alive and leaving the room so I didn’t have to hear that dreaded ‘screaming’ sound they make when the steam starts to escape their shells. I always wanted to save them – but it’s tough to do when you’re a kid surrounded by adults salivating over the idea of eating the rubbery creatures. So, I’m happy to hear that some good Samaritans out in Vancouver were able to save a 22-lb, 100-year-old lobster from a similar fate.

From Green Daily:

Big Dee-Dee was caught off New Brunswick, Canada last week, and had been arousing interest from both conservationists and connisseurs of cooked crusteaceans. The owner of the the aptly named Big Fish shop where Dee-Dee was temporarily living had received more than 100 offers to buy the old boy, including one who would have paid a cool 5 grand to fly him to Ontario to be guest of honour at a company banquet.

However, all’s well that ends well and next week a marine biologist will pack Dee-Dee up in a truck and take him down to the ocean, where he will be returned to the wet and wild from whence he came. After which he will likely get wander into another trap and end up back at the Big Fish, because lobsters aren’t really all that smart. But it’s still a happy ending, for now.

The Green Daily provided an update on July 21st, saying that the owner of Big Fish decided to donate Dee-Dee to an aquarium, fearing that a return to the cold water would kill him.

Hurray for Dee-Dee! Anything that’s managed to live that long should be left to live its life in peace.

Link [Green Daily]
Photo credit: Flickr user Gill Rickson

Many Face Scrubs Contain Tiny Water-Polluting Beads of Plastic

Just when you think you’ve heard it all in regards to dangerous, unhealthy, bad-for-the-environment ingredients in cosmetics and personal care products, here comes more bad news. If you use an exfoliating face scrub to keep your skin smooth and healthy-looking, you may want to check the ingredients. Many companies are using tiny particles of plastic to get that smooth effect, which in turn end up in our watershed and may be ingested by marine life.

From Yahoo! Green:

One Australian researcher found that plastic fragments smaller than 1 millimeter are increasingly common in our oceans. In one British estuary, 85 percent of the plastic garbage was this “microplastic” debris. Sewage treatment systems can’t filter it out, so this tiny plastic junk pollutes the watershed and can be ingested by marine life.

Those little beads may feel nice on your skin, but in the long run, they’re not doing the planet any good. Besides, you can find plenty of cleansers that use natural stuff to scrub the dirt off your face.

Some of the eco-friendly brands have been around for ages, they don’t cost any more than the plasticized versions, yet they won’t clog up poor little fishy bodies when we’re done with them.

The brands using plastic beads include Aveeno, Clean & Clear, Dove, Neutrogena, Noxzema, Olay and Phisoderm (see Yahoo! Green for the full list, and a list of safe alternatives). While you could continue purchasing pre-made scrubs that are more natural and don’t contain plastic (Christ on a bicycle, plastic? Really?), I’ve got a simple trick for you that I’ve been using for years. Keep a shaker of sugar, salt or baking soda in your bathroom. Add a little to your regular face wash when you need some exfoliating power. It seriously works better than any pre-packaged product I’ve ever tried, it’s ultra cheap, it saves packaging and you’ll know for sure exactly what’s in it.

Check out this Slate article, ‘Scrubbing Out Sea Life’, for more details on how harmful those little plastic beads can be.

Link [Yahoo! Green] + [Slate]

Woman’s £80,000 Home Now Worth Only £1

If you’ve been complaining lately that your home lost some value in the recent real estate downturn, quit your bitchin’ - it could be a lot worse. British homeowner Jane Archer got the shock of her life this week: her 3-bedroom bungalow with uninterrupted sea views in the small Norfolk village of Happisburg was appraised at just £1 ($2). The property had previously been worth £80,000 ($157,000). The reason? Chronic coastal erosion.

From Money.co.uk:

When the Mum of three originally purchased the property for £20,000 ($39,000) in 1987 it sat over 400 metres from the striking coastline. Now just 60 meters of land separates her bungalow from the sea. This leaves her faced with the prospect that after 20 years of mortgage payments her family home is now worth less than a loaf of bread.

Ms Archer and her partner Chris Cutting had planned to use the property as collateral for a business loan and arranged the valuation accordingly. The couple’s intention was to expand their car repair business with the funds raised. However, to add insult to injury they have now lost out on an additional £60,000 ($118,000) by backing out of the deal.

Several homes and a long stretch of road have already been lost to sea after the wooden groynes that previously protected the 80ft high cliffs began to fail. A 12th century church and listed lighthouse are soon set to follow, along with the many other houses and businesses in the village, as Happisburg is left to slip into the sea.

Apparently, the British government stopped ‘coastal defense measures’ in smaller towns to focus on protecting ‘main resorts’ from the sea. There is no kind of compensation scheme in place to reimburse families like the Archers, who stand to lose everything they’ve worked for.

Link [Money.co.uk]

Man Saves a Bear from Drowning in the Ocean

Adam Warwick is a hero. This wildlife officer took off his clothes and plunged into the ocean to go after a bear weighing 364 pounds, to save its life. The bear had been hit by a tranquilizer dart and surely would have drowned otherwise. It had been found roaming in a beachfront community in Florida.

From The Daily Telegraph:

Wildlife officer Mr Warwick, 29, who works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission-wasted no time in stripping off to help.

”I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I jumped in,” he said.

”It was a spur of the moment decision, I had a lot of adrenaline pumping.

”I was swimming towards the bear, trying to prevent him from swimming into deeper water.

”He was losing function in his arms and legs, and was obviously in distress. I knew I had to keep him from drowning.

”The clearly confused bear looked at me as if he was either going to go by, through or over me . . . and at times he even looked as if he was just going to climb on top of me to keep from drowning,’ he said.

As the animal struggled to keep its head above water, Mr Warwick slipped one arm under the bear to cradle its body and clamped the other on to the scruff of its neck, dragging it ashore.

That’s quite a feat of strength, and bravery to boot. Once Warwick got the bear onto the beach, a local resident used his mechanical digger to lift the bear the rest of the way out of the water. The bear was later released into a state national forest.

Link [The Daily Telegraph]

China Frantically Trying to Clean Up Red Algae Blooms Before Olympics

Thousands of people in the coastal Chinese city of Qingdao are working to clean up huge amounts of algae that currently cover the beaches and the water along the coastline. This ‘red tide’ in the Yellow Sea threatens to interfere with the upcoming Olympics. Qingdao officials are trying to convince the public that the bloom has been caused by increased rainfall and warmer waters rather than the fact that several coastal cities dump raw sewage into the water and high levels of nitrates empty into the sea from agricultural and industrial runoff. Yeah, okay.

From the International Herald Tribune:

Local officials have initiated an all-out effort to clean up the algae by mid-July. Media reports estimate that as many as 20,000 people have either volunteered or been ordered to participate in the operation, while 1,000 boats are scooping algae out of the Yellow Sea. The official news agency, Xinhua, reported that algae currently covered a third of the coastal waters designated for the Olympic races.

Yuan Zhiping, an official with the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Committee, said Sunday that the government would attempt to block algae from floating into the Olympic sailing area by installing a fenced perimeter in the sea that is more than 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, long.

“I believe we will make sure the Olympics sailing area is clean by July 15 through our efforts, and make sure the Olympics sailing goes smoothly,” Yuan said, according to the Shandong News Web site.

The massive algae outbreak comes as some sailing teams are already in Qingdao preparing for the Olympics.

What a mess! Massive red tides, insane levels of air pollution, destroyed ecosystems, contaminated water – all of this certainly makes China seem like an incredibly dirty, messed up place. And so much of it is due to China desperately trying to emulate the Western world in terms of prosperity (great example we’ve given them) and due to our own polluting factories in China, taking advantage of the cheap labor. Time for changes all around!

Link [International Herald Tribune]
Photo credit: Stringer/Reuters

Dumped Corpses Give Sharks a Taste for Human Flesh

Experts believe that a pack of bull sharks in Mexico is intentionally targeting humans, after recent attacks have killed two surfers and injured another. A fourth swimmer is missing. The deadly 10-ft long sharks may have developed a taste for human flesh after feasting on corpses dumped by the mob. There are enough dead bodies ‘swimming with the fishes’ to cause sharks to crave people?

From The Sun:

The beach at Zihuantanejo – near Acapulco and popular with British tourists – had not previously recorded a shark incident in more than 30 years.

And, with an annual average of only four fatal shark attacks globally, the fact that two people have died along the same stretch of coast within weeks has astonished international experts.

The Zihuantanejo deaths come halfway through what is already turning into a bumper year for shark attacks.

Zihuantanejo is now gripped by fear. Police have been guarding beaches and signs warn against going into the water.

Local businessmen, worried the deaths will devastate the tourist industry, hired fishermen to kill the sharks.

We sense another ‘Jaws’ script being written at this very moment…

Link [The Sun] via [Frost Fire Zoo]

Activists Take Junk Journey Through ‘Plastic Soup’ in Pacific Ocean

When you picture the Pacific Ocean, you probably imagine cool breezes, deep blue waves cresting in cascades of white foam, dolphins surfacing playfully and birds flying overhead. Unfortunately, that cheery picture is becoming naught but a memory as the ocean is increasingly polluted by astonishing amounts of trash.

On a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, sailors Markus Eriksen and Joel Paschal were sickened by what they saw in the Pacific: continent-sized patches of plastic litter. They discovered pollution to a shocking extent in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a ‘swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States’. Tests done on the water show that plastic outnumbers plankton 48 to 1. On the surface, the water looks clean, but when you pull up a sample from beneath you get what Algalita’s education advisor Anna Cummins describes as ‘plastic soup’.

The Green Tech Blog has more:

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn’t well understood because satellites can’t spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

“No one really knows what’s out in the other gyres,” Cummins said. “In the north Pacific alone there’s Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members.”

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.

“Recycling isn’t the solution,” Cummins said. “We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic.”

The activists are going on a journey sailing more than 1,000 miles from California to Hawaii to further explore the problem, traveling on a motorless craft made from recycled materials including 15,000 bottles, fishing nets and the cockpit of a Cessna. They’ll have GPS units, VHF radios, a Coast Guard beacon and three months’ worth of food and water. You can follow their journey on the blog JUNK.

Link [Green Tech Blog] + [JUNK]
Photo credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.

A Nature-Inspired Underwater Power Generator that Looks Like Sharks

Following nature’s innate wisdom when planning a design seems like a really smart idea. I love bio-mimicry, and this is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen. Underwater generators that disturb sea life as little as possible and look this awesome? Love it.

Gizmodo has it:

It never hurts to take cues from nature when designing technology, and that’s just what BioPower Systems did when engineering its bioSTREAM underwater generator. It’s inspired by shark tails, using the shape in a fixed device that moves with the motion of the ocean. It reverses the use of the tail, with the water moving it rather than it moving in the water, but by anchoring it to a fixed point it allows it to align itself in any direction depending on how the flow is moving. No word on just how cost-effective generating energy this way would be, however.

I wish they would add shark fins to them that stick out of the water. I’d pay to go see that – a giant field of artificial sharks swimming in an unchanging and immovable formation.

Read more about biologically inspired ocean power systems at the BioPower Systems website.

Link [Gizmodo] + [BioPower Systems]

It’s Mind Blowing Time: VBS.TV Visits the Garbage Filled Pacific Ocean Gyre

Excuse my language, but holy fracking shite! I’ve been aware of the global tragedy that is the Pacific Ocean Gyre for a while now, but I REALLY didn’t ‘get it’ until I watched this 12 part video from VBS.tv- TOXIC: Garbage Island. In short- humans have created a toxic wasteland of plasticized stew the size of the continental United States.

Stop whatever you are doing right now and go watch them.

Link [VBS.TV- TOXIC- Garbage Island Part 1]

Pavlov’s Fish: Researchers Train Fish to Swim Into Nets For Harvest

The march of science, as described by Trendhunter Magazine:

Once again, with the idea of restocking our depleting resources, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole, Mass. are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves using sound.

The fish swim into a net when they hear a tone signaling feeding time. The system could eventually allow depleted fish like black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage at harvest time when they hear the signal. This way, farmed fish might be better acclimated to the wild when they can be called to feed every few days. The big goal is to help with the costs of fish farming, an important source of the world’s seafood. Trained fish return after several days of feeding saving the farms money on feed and reducing the fish waste released in concentrated areas.

The fish will actually swim into an underwater structure called the Aquadome (someone has been watching old Mad Max movies at Woods Hole).

It was the Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov who conditioned dogs to salivate when they heard the bell that announced feeding time, and the Aquadome works on the same principle. A major hurdle for the researchers will be the question of how many fish are lost to predators. I know from long personal experience that fish are pretty dense, but maybe they can be taught this skill, intricate for them. I wonder, though, if other fish will learn to associate the sound with food. Like sharks.

Link: [Trendhunter Magazine]

Photo credit: Flickr user Florian

Head For the Hills, Stock Up The Larder, And Git Yer Guns Loaded, Another Huge Antarctic Ice Shelf has Collapsed

Stock up the foot, clean the guns, and get your waders on- the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf is in high gear. The Wilkins ice shelf, an area 160 square miles large, seven times the size of Manhattan, has suddenly collapsed. Scientists had the rare opportunity to film the collapse when they saw it happening over satellite images and diverted more lenses to cover it, even getting an airplane in the air to shoot video and photos.

There are two kinds of polar ice- sea ice and land ice (not the scientific names, but they’ll do here). The sea ice sits in the ocean, most of it sitting below water level. When those ice shelfs break off they don’t have much of an impact on sea levels. When the land ice- the glaciers sitting on the ground above sea level- collapses, it adds new mass into the ocean and can quickly raise sea levels across the globe.

The Antarctic land ice is being held back by the now quickly collapsing sea ice. As the world’s temperature rises snow and ice melt and run down to the ground through the glacier in giant ice tunnels. The water follows the slope of the land down to the ocean and acts like a lubricant between the ground and the glacier ice above. When the sea ice has collapsed enough not to hold up the lubricated land ice, it can all fall apart in a matter of hours and days.

How do you think the world would react to a 20 foot rise in sea levels over the course of a day? It’d be pure chaos and madness, epic disaster movie style.

Someone smarter than me has put together a Google Maps mashup that will show you what rising sea levels look like on a map of the world meter by meter. See for yourself. New York City would be really screwed.

The future will be nothing if not interesting.

Links [Huffington Post] & [The National Snow and Ice Data Center] & [The British Antarctic Survey]

Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Swim with the Dolphins…

Dolphins have done a pretty good job in cultivating a rep for being cute, cuddly, shipwreck-survivor-saving sea mammals. It turns out they’re not all they appear to be. Turns out, they’re cold blooded killers.

The Telegraph has it:

New evidence has been compiled by marine scientists that prove the normally placid dolphin is capable of brutal attacks both on innocent fellow marine mammals and, more disturbingly, on its own kind.

Film taken of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby porpoises, tossing them in the air and pursuing them to the death has solved a long-term mystery of what causes the death of so many of these harmless mammals - but has left animal experts baffled as to the motive.

Another mystery is that the animal ‘murders’ have only been reported in two parts of the world - along Scotland’s East Coast and in America off the beaches of Virginia, where even more alarmingly, the victims were scores of the dolphins’ own young.

Life in nature can be a real bitch sometimes.

Link [Telegraph UK]

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