GIANT PACFIC ITRASH ISLAND PATCH
GIANT PACFIC ITRASH ISLAND FULL

Ocean plastics that don’t end up asphyxiating an albatross or entangling an elephant seal eventually break down into microplastics, which penetrate every branch of the food web and are nearly impossible to remove from the environment.

GIANT PACFIC ITRASH ISLAND FULL

Everything from fish to whales can become entangled, and animals often mistake it for food and end up starving to death with stomachs full of plastic. Plastic in the ocean poses a threat to marine life, killing more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals, according to UNESCO. We are collecting several tons of plastic every week with our system - plastic that is affecting the environment.” “You have to take into account the effects of plastic pollution on other species. “It’s too early to reach any conclusions on how we should react to that study,” he said. Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, disagreed with Dr.

The results of her study “really emphasize the need to study the open ocean before we try to manipulate it, modify it, clean it up or extract minerals from it.” “When it comes to figuring out what to do about the plastic that’s already in the ocean, I think we need to be really careful,” she said.

GIANT PACFIC ITRASH ISLAND PATCH

Helm believes any large-scale removal of plastic from the patch could pose a threat to its neuston inhabitants. Although adjustments to the net’s design have been made to reduce bycatch, Dr. Helm and other scientists warn that such nets threaten sea life, including neuston. Once the net is full, a ship takes its contents to land for proper disposal.ĭr. The largest, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the Netherlands, developed a net specifically to collect and concentrate marine debris as it is pulled across the sea’s surface by winds and currents. There are two nonprofit organizations working to remove floating plastic from the Great Pacific Patch. But garbage isn’t the only thing these gyres are gathering. The largest, the Great Pacific Patch, is halfway between Hawaii and California and contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic, according to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. For nearly a century, floating plastic waste has been pouring into the gyres, creating an assortment of garbage patches. They act like enormous whirlpools, so anything floating within one will eventually be pulled into its center. The world’s oceans contain five gyres, large systems of circular currents powered by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation. Helm and other scientists say, it may complicate efforts by conservationists to remove the immense and ever-growing amount of plastic in the patch. The findings were posted last month on bioRxiv and have not yet been subjected to peer review.

To see them in that concentration was like, wow.” “I had this hypothesis that gyres concentrate life and plastic in similar ways, but it was still really surprising to see just how much we found out there,” said Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the study.

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