Ninety-nine percent of the ocean's plastic is missing

[G_j]

http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/06/ninety-nine-percent-oceans-plastic-missing#disqus_thread

Angus Chen 30 June 2014

Millions of tons. That’s how much plastic should be floating in the world’s oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it.

If that’s the case, “there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web,” says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. “And we are part of this food web.”

Humans produce almost 300 million tons of plastic each year. Most of this ends up in landfills or waste pits, but a 1970s National Academy of Sciences study estimated that 0.1% of all plastic washes into the oceans from land, carried by rivers, floods, or storms, or dumped by maritime vessels. Some of this material becomes trapped in Arctic ice and some, landing on beaches, can even turn into rocks made of plastic. But the vast majority should still be floating out there in the sea, trapped in midocean gyres—large eddies in the center of oceans, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

To figure out how much refuse is floating in those garbage patches, four ships of the Malaspina expedition, a global research project studying the oceans, fished for plastic across all five major ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. After months of trailing fine mesh nets around the world, the vessels came up light—by a lot. Instead of the millions of tons scientists had expected, the researchers calculated the global load of ocean plastic to be about only 40,000 tons at the most, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We can’t account for 99% of the plastic that we have in the ocean,” says Duarte, the team’s leader.

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“Yes, animals are eating it,” says oceanographer Peter Davison of the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research in Petaluma, California, who was not involved in the study. “That much is indisputable.” But, he says, it’s hard to know at this time what the biological consequences are. Toxic ocean pollutants like DDT, PCBs, or mercury cling to the surface of plastics, causing them to “suck up all the pollutants in the water and concentrate them.” When animals eat the plastic, that poison could be going into the fish and traveling up the food chain to market species like tuna or swordfish. Or, Davison says, toxins in the fish “may dissolve back into the water … or for all we know they’re puking [the plastic] or pooping it out, and there’s no long-term damage. We don’t know.”

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On the hunt. The RV Hesperides tows along a net designed to skim the ocean surface, catching floating plastic particles (inset).

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, G_j.

[randome]

2. Oh, it won't be missing for long.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[Submariner]

3. The oceans are already totally f*cked

Your kids and grandkids are f*cked.

That crap will be in the ocean until our sun goes supernova, evaporates our oceans, and incinerates the planet.

When I got in the marine biology business in the early '70s when the 14 major fisheries around the planet were healthy, the issue then in the North Atlantic was, get this, if we do not watch our haddock fishing limits, we will have to eat cod, which has a rep for getting wormy.

Now ALL 14 of those fisheries are almost wiped out, and they are continuing to over fish them.

Like I said, your kids are screwed, and your grandkids generation will look back at our generation as a bunch of stupid greedy assh*les.