By
MICHELLE RINDELS, Associated Press Writer Michelle Rindels,
Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 4 mins ago
It would
seem that when a real environmental problem appears that we can plainly see and
understand, that the giant liberal environmental
machine would snap into immediate action and begin to clean up the problem.
In this
case floating plastic dumps the size of
LOS ANGELES – A tawny stuffed puppy bobs in cold sea water, his four stiff legs
tangled in the green net of some nameless fisherman.
It's one of the
bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of
the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.
Most of the trash
has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether
it's sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it.
During their
August fact-finding expedition, a group of
"It's pretty
shocking — it's unusual to find exactly what you're looking for," said
Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
at UC San Diego
on the three-week voyage.
While scientists
have documented trash's harmful effects for coastal marine life, there's little research
on garbage patches, which were first explored extensively by self-trained ocean
researcher Charles Moore just a decade ago. There's also scant research on the
marine life at the bottom of the food chain that inhabit the patch.
But even the
weather-beaten, sunbleached plastic flakes that are smaller than a thumbnail
can be alarming.
"They're the
right size to be interacting with the food chain out there," Goldstein
said.
The team also
netted occasional water bottles with barnacles clinging to the side. Some of
the trash had labels written in Chinese and English, hints of the long journeys
garbage takes to arrive mid-ocean.
Plastic sea trash
doesn't biodegrade and often floats at the surface. Bottlecaps, bags and
wrappers that end up in the ocean from the wind or through overflowing sewage
systems can then drift thousands of miles.
The sheer
quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre, a
vortex formed by ocean and wind
currents and located 1,000 miles off the
A study released
earlier this month estimated that thousands of tons of plastic debris wind up
in the oceans every year, and some of that has ended up in the swirling
currents of the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch.
Katsuhiko Saido,
a chemist at
The Scripps team
hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions
of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is
the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a
water bottle?
Plastics have
entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by
the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die
trash-related deaths each year.
The scientists
hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris,
especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere,
where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger.
"We're
afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go
there," said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Only humans are
to blame for ocean debris, Goldstein said. In a blog entry posted a day before
the science ship arrived in
"Seeing that
influence just floating out here in the middle of nowhere makes our power
painfully obvious, and the consequences of the
industrial age plain," she wrote. "It's not a pretty sight."