Floating plastic island in the Pacific

Incredible! I guess I must have missed this one totally until this morning in the local news. I guess we should really do something about preventing pollution....

The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan - Environment - Independent.co.uk

Floating toxic plastic garbage island twice the size of Texas - Boing Boing

 

Incredible indeed. How did it get that big? How deep is it? Just flotsam/jetsam from the years. Looks like things are catching up with us all.
"You better stop screwing around Daddy." ...All that Jazz...
They ought to put some of those gigantic "drift-nets" around all of it and tow it up to the Bering Straight to make a fish friendly land bridge, and kill two birds with one stone.

Kidding, of course.

 

I read in the papers it is some 10 meters deep....Eek!

 

Amazing, and still many people are not worried about pollution :-(

How much more plastic does it take to wake up everybody?

_

 

should send it to china and mold it into a giant wall.

Great Wall of Modern China!

 

Junk journey highlights 'plastic soup' of Pacific Ocean | Green Tech - CNET News.com

 

Frankly, I flat out do not believe it.

It sounds like more typical scare science from the loony fringe of the Greens. If the plastic is as thick as claimed, just why can't satellite cameras detect it? Cameras can detect things like concentrations of plankton which are even less dense than this claimed concentration of plastic would be. Such a concentration of plastic would affect the ocean's absorption of light and that would show up on film. It would also have other effects such as the temperature distribution of the water which could be measured by satellite sensors. The area is remote, but far from totally untraversed; ships, fishing boats, and private yachts, do cross the area and it's damned strange that the crews of these vessels do not notice something.

If a reputable oceanographic research institution were to send a well-equipped vessel, manned by researchers who were willing to put their professional reputations on the line by exploring the area and publishing their results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, I'd be inclined to give the matter serious consideration, but only when the data is compiled and can be checked by other researchers in a systematic manner.

I've seen far too many examples of these environmental "scientists" skewing, spinning, and outright fabricating, their data, or just lying about the results of their "investigations", to give them any credence. When the Scripps Institute brings back pictures and publishes a report with complete data, then I'll give it my concern.

 

Every winter I fish in the Gulf of Mexico, and I can tell you the amount of plastic I see firsthand that gets dumped into the water is phenomenal!
DA, there are pictures of this as well. I have a saltwater "reef" tank" and I am involved with a reef Forum as well, we talked about this a few weeks back, if I can find the pictures I'll post them here. Anyway, recycle your plastic!

 

I'm a sailor. I've made ocean voyages throughout the Pacific in the last four decades, including one trip in a sailboat through the area in question. We saw a few isolated pieces (you could count them on the fingers of one hand) of plastic near the smaller Hawaiian islands, but nothing like the concentration claimed.

Is there plastic in the ocean? Yes. Should it be there? No. is there a "floating island" of plastic the size of a continent in the Pacific? No. If there was, there'd be many, many pictures, some of them taken from a satellite, to prove it.

This is just more scare science from the folks who brought you "global warming" and the other environmental BS that's going around these days. If there was that much organic matter (and plastic is largely carbon and other organic material) in the ocean, you can bet that there would be some organism exploiting it The greens have lied about these environmental "disasters" so often, that any time they make any claim now, I say, "Prove it!"

 

So you don't think global warming is real? Plastic the size of a continent OK never heard anything about it and after doing research didn't found any pictures or satelite imags of the said plastic island. But global warming is quite a reality. If you look just a little you'll find lot's of info with empiric data. How the sun is no longer the main causer of planetary weather for instance, how the levels of CO2 have increased in the las 50 years, etc...



Cheers...

 

Something about the north pole´s ice situation:

U.S. Department of the Interior - Secretary Kempthorne Remarks - Remarks By Secretary Kempthorne - Press Conference On Polar Bear Listing - May 14, 2008

 

This is actually pretty funny to me now, I've spent the better part of 3 hours researching this thing, and it turns out that DA is somewhat correct. This is like and urban legend! The photos that were posted on the aquarium forum I'm a part of were not accurate at all.
It seems that there is much garbage floating in this area in the pacific, but there are "dead spots" like this throughout the world. The garbage accumulates in all of these spots. And yes there is a great deal of plastic floating in these areas. But don't think of it as a giant floating garbage pile. It's more of a spread out debris field. With flotsam everywhere, tires, plastic bottles, garbage and the like. And yes it's horrible. There are a few videos of this on youtube, but they really disprove the "huge floating island" theory! On one video they drag a small net through the water and come up with a small bottle that they dropped all the debris into, which makes it look horrible. That's not accurate at all! Who knows how long they dragged that thing thru the water, it could have been for 2 days for all we know!
I'm a little ticked that I fell for this, I usually don't! As these "treehuggers" go to great lengths to make their story look credible, and will say anything to drum up some press coverage!

DA, you are right! This does seem to be one of those stories started by some "the world is ending" types! I bought into it too! But trust me, this is more "urban legend" than reality.

I stand corrected.



Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

It would not ( really ) surprise me as the green people so often have made mistakes by the way they tell of the situation.

However I must say we should be aware what will happen if we go on the way we do. And it seems plastic is there and will be long after us.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Plastic blights Hawaii's beaches

Sea of plastic :: Honolulu Weekly

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New 'battle of Midway' over plastic

BBC NEWS | Magazine | In defence of plastic bags

 

Absolutely Kai!
It is definitely a problem. We all need to step up and do what we can to keep this planet as clean as we can!

 

I read about that some time ago Kai, we really are dreadful at times and no one wants to make the effort to do something about it.

 

Global warming may, or may not, be real. It's probably true that the earth's average temperature is rising, but even that's not a sure thing, and there is no agreement among real scientists as to the cause(s). As for man's role in the whole thing, no reputable scientist will claim to understand completely the mechanisms that influence the temperature of the globe. So no one, at this point knows, if there is really any effective course man can take to affect it.

One thing we do have a pretty good idea about, is that for much of it's 4.4 billion year history, the earth was much warmer than it currently is. This suggests that the current temperature is an aberration, which is destined to be "corrected" by whatever natural mechanisms which influence the global temperature. That, in turn, suggests there very well may be nothing that we can, or should, do to try to control earth's temperature.

At any rate, the "scientists" who are so frantically urging us to "do something" about it, have a record of mis-representing, skewing, fabricating, and out-right lying, about the data that is nothing short of disgraceful. There is absolutely no reason anyone should believe them without demanding incontrovertible proof about every last assertion they make. So far no one has been able to supply such proof.

 

This is simply not true. There are numerous commercial companies , government agencies, and private individuals and organizations engaged in research to develop ways to solve the problems posed by plastic pollution.

See;

http://http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/09/64862

http://http://maps.csc.noaa.gov/RoisDatabaseEntry/lawDetails.jsp?lawID=37

http://http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/33/usc_sup_01_33_10_33.html

http://http://boatingsailing.suite101.com/blog.cfm/marine_plastic_pollution_resources

http://http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/?review=1#url=http://news.therecord.com/article/354044

 

None of those links work.

Research is just another word for paper work and no action.
We would not have the problem in the first place if more care was taken.

 

Honest mistakes I could forgive, it's the widespread use of deliberate lies and outright fabrications of data that anger me. At the very least, the environmental "scientists" who peddle this tripe in an attempt to scare people into precipitous actions which may solve a problem, but often end up causing even more damage because the "environmentalists" didn't really understand the problem in the first place, are guilty of criminal fraud. For example, the hue and cry against the use of styrofoam packaging by the fast food industry resulted in a return to paper-based packaging which caused a worse depletion in our forests and additional pollution due to paper manufacturing methods. The net result was a less efficient use of natural resources, and energy, and a net increase in pollution worldwide.

I can understand people wanting to create awareness of real problems, but lying, or even exaggerating, the extent of environmental problems and the potential consequences, is wrong and only causes people to exercise extreme skepticism of future claims.