Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Trash Talking Early: Plastic "Continents" of Trash

     Plastic "continents" are not static. Based on the oceanic circulation modelling work conducted in the Pacific, the Institute de Recherche et Developpement (IRD) and the National Council for Scientific Rearch (CNRS) researchers have recently shown that there are exit currents for these areas of the sea where these piles of waste build up. This means that they are not caught in a never-ending whirlpool in the middle of the ocean, as had been previously thought. Although inappropriate given the actual estimated concentrations, this term highlights the awareness of the impact of human activity on the oceans.




.    Due to the winds on the surface of the oceans and the rotation of the earth (via the Coriolis force), huge vortexes, called "oceanic gyres," are formed in each of the five major basins: North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. These huge whirlpools slowly gather in their wake all the plastic objects and waste floating on the surface of the water, accumulating year after year.






      


      This pollution is now recognized as a global problem, representing a threat to marine biodiversity. In particular, this surface drift acts as a means of transport for the viruses and bacteria that the spread across the oceans.


      Nevertheless, these plastic "continents," as they are incorrectly christened, are not, in fact, static. The IRD and CNRS researchers have recently revealed the existence of "exit doors" leading away from these large surface current convergence zones. The scientists started by studying the oceanic circulation in the Pacific modelled with a much finer spatial resolution than that of the models generally used for this type of study (those typically used for climate research). They simulated the trajectories of several million particles, with currents defined on networks of 1/32° to 1/4° (meaning a range from a few kilometers to thirty or forty kilometers).






      The results obtained highlight currents, several hundred kilometers wide, which escape from the heart of the subtropical gyre and head eastwards instead. In addition to these currents there are physical processes such as the effects of the wind and waves, not taken into account in the models, which can also alter the trajectory and the transit time of the particles and waste.


     In the Pacific, the waste may not necessarily be trapped in the centre of the oceanic gyre and may be removed in the direction of the American coasts. Furthermore, these results are backed up by the work of the IRD's Chilean partners. They have observed an increase in the amount of waste collected on their coastlines.





     More detailed observations, modelling and analyses are needed to gain a better understanding of the ocean surface currents that regulate the slow routing of plastic waste on the surface of the seas and, in the medium-term, implement strategies for collecting and recycling all of this waste.

         I saw first-hand the dumping of all our waste aboard the Research Vessel Eastward in the Mediterranean Sea in 1978. The ship's captain laughed at me when I suggested that continual trash dumping would add up to eventually plug up the oceans. It was so devastating to see those empty cans of Spam floating in the sea.








Trash talking pre-LIV,
Steph

62 comments:

  1. What a relief! The trash isn't stuck out in the ocean forever; it's coming to our beaches.

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  2. Replies
    1. Fascinating, long article that I might also post elsewhere, if you get my drift. . .

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    2. What did I do to deserve children like this??? (A classic Jewish mother lament)

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  3. A gyre is a circular or spiral motion or form, especially a circular ocean current.

    Does the gyre image look wonky on your screen? On mine, it lies atop some of the text. I tried to fix it 3 times already.

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    1. Yes, the 5 plastic gyres image is definitely floating about.

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    2. Yes, it's blocking the text that starts, "This pollution is no...."

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    3. I'm going to leave it for now. It seems fitting on this current post.

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    4. I shall. I did read that today (1/9) is the day of highest office worker accidents. I did warn the dental hygienist and Maizie's vet assistant today. Maizie did not care and is snoring away.

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  4. Just in case you missed it this morning: NEW PLANET, discovered by someone born ~~ 2003.

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  5. Replies
    1. Good to confirm that Amy Goodman is the only journalist who has pronounced her name correctly.

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  6. "We are stardust, billion year old carbon"? Ha! Try seven billion!

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  7. Apropos of nothing, Buzz Aldrin turns 90 today.

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  8. Replies
    1. Whenever I hear an ad for someone offering a drag and drop editor, I always first mis-parse it and wonder what a dragon drop is?

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  9. Replies
    1. Sounds like a good thing Julie Schwinghamer was CAPTCHA'd (failed the Turing Test).

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    2. Yes! What a strange, strange thing to do.

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  10. Replies
    1. I've posted this here before, but even before Exxon was covering it up and James Hanson was exposing it, every (and I mean every) elementary school kid from the late 1950's to the early 1970's learned about climate science.

      And just for fun, he notes the annual release of 6 billion tons of CO2; it's more like 30 billion tons now. As John Waters once said to me, "See you in Hell!"

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  11. Replies
    1. Do they have the budget to add to the collection?

      Usually Ebay has better offerings, someone had a moldy piece of wallboard with an image vaguely resembling Jesus, I think it was $100,000 or so. Of course, something's always happenin' in Texas.

      If you will indulge a memory, when I was a college student there was a story about a Miracle Madonna appearing every night on the wall of a house near Wilkes-Barre, PA. Hundreds of people, some traveling great distances, were flocking to see this Holy Sight.

      With strained resources for crowd control, the local sheriff discovered the cause of this miracle: a newly installed street lamp was reflecting light from a VERY REAL crystal Madonna a neighbor had placed in their window. He asked the neighbor to move the statuette, and the miracle (and crowds) immediately evaporated.

      This student with strained resources (generic Mac N Cheese, 10/ $1.00) had an idea: why not just hide a slide projector in the bushes and shine an image on the wall? Too easy, you say? How about (secretly) painting an image of a religious icon on the wall, and then covering it with really cheap or watered down paint which will wear away, slowly revealing the Sacred Image. And one could sell Holy (toilet) Water in little vials for $5, thus affording brand-name Mac N Cheese.

      Story's over, time for bed kids. Did you say your prayers?

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  12. Replies
    1. I hadn't seen those trippy trees before, too bad they don't survive around here, they'd be perfect in the Haight-Ashbury.

      I notice your plastics pile is eerily evocative.

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    2. Yes, it did make me think of the pile. . .

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    3. I wonder whether you could dump different colored watercolors around your tree each year and get rainbow growth rings?

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    4. ... Speaking of which (only very tangentially related), a book recommendation for science and literature fans: Ted Chiang's "Exhalation". Excellent sci-fi short stories.

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  13. I surely hope all these are true, but especially #35.

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    1. #10 (ducks as pesticide) reminded me of the Berkeley EcoHouse, which I helped create and served on the Board for many years. We also used ducks (black Indian Runner Ducks) to deal with our snails. Our tenant (an arborist) estimated we had hundreds of snails before the ducks came, afterwards fewer than a dozen. Neighbors would collect their snails and feed the ducks, kids would squeal with laughter.

      And we put a "green roof" (#16) on our gardening shed. And related to several items, a UC Berkeley entomologist visited and counted around 20 different bee species, including 10 or so native bees. On a 5000 sf lot.

      But I'm still pessimistic.

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  14. We here at PEOTS are happy to see that GRAMMAR gets TOP BILLING in this quote from liberal arts major and author Tuchman:

    '“The seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.'

    ― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century


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  15. No wonder we are exhausted:

    "In the introduction to her 1978 book A Distant Mirror, Tuchman playfully identified a historical phenomenon which she termed "Tuchman's Law," to wit:

    Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

    Tuchman's Law has been defined as a psychological principle of "perceptual readiness" or "subjective probability"."

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  16. Replies
    1. Not much of an experiment. It suggests that you might be OK using your undershorts instead of a HEPA filter, which I don't recommend.

      While we're on the subject, I got into an argument with my resident while on my surgery rotation in school. He (and the medical party line) claimed that the reason we keep abdominal surgery patients in the hospital until they pass gas is that flatus consists (at least mostly) of swallowed air, and that passing gas means the lumen of the GI tract is open from mouth to anus. I shut him down by pointing out that if flatus was swallowed air, we wouldn't be able to light farts.

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    2. 3 things of interest to me:

      1) This is from the NIH website....our government at work (granted it was the Bush Administration)
      2) This is almost 20 years old, which means WW probably didn't get it in a feed, or from another article, so
      3) What was she looking for?

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  17. Replies
    1. I briefly studied firefly femme fatales in grad school.

      My advisor told me that some trees in southeast Asia filled with synchronous flashing male fireflies were dependable enough that they appeared on aeronautical charts, though my recent attempts to find references corroborating this have been unsuccessful.

      A mating system like this, where males gather together to more effectively attract females is called a lek, which is a great word. (It also refers to Albanian currency and a Norwegian softcore porn mag.)

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    2. Interesting.

      Lek, huh? I wonder if there's any connection to lecherous. . .Maybe so, somewhat inconclusive.

      Btw, an antonym to lecherous is schoolmisstressy! Ha!

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  18. From Massive Science: We have known for quite some time that bats were the primary source of both the SARS epidemic and the Nipah virus. The Ebola virus also originates in fruit bats, which can infect other forest animals who then pass the virus to humans. And evidence strongly suggests that bats have played this same role – which scientists term the “reservoir species” – in the coronavirus outbreak. There are over 1,300 known species of bats, making them the second largest group of mammals on Earth. But their strange immune systems that make them the reservoir species for so many viruses are what make them truly special.

    Wow, there's a lot I didn't know about BATS. Go ahead, eco, and STRAP, take a STAB at this batty knowledge ;-).
    .

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    1. This was my earlier hunch about bats and White Nose Syndrome and a Coronavirus; finally found some research linking the two:

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33975-x

      Because, of course, it is all linked and we are messing up the planet species by species. . .

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    2. "This suggested that superficial infection with fungus, P. destructans, was the driving factor for altered gene expression in the bat intestines."

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  19. New post on "Many Grains of Truth: Sand Dunes "Communicating" with Each Other" is now up.

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