On June 10, 2009 Captain Charles Moore set off on Algalita's Oceanographic Research Vessel for the first leg of a four month expedition from California to past the Northern Hawaiian Islands to test for plastic marine debris.
Captain Moore discovered the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, known as the the Pacific Gyre, and he is continuing his research to help all of us understand that the rapid rise in global plastic production is leading to a rise in plastic pollution and its devastating effects on our oceans and our lives.
Over the next few weeks, I will be posting emails directly from Captain Moore so we can follow his journey and better understand what we are doing to our oceans.
Here's the first:
June 13, 2009
Day 3
Noon position: 29Ëš46min38secs N and 121Ëš53min27secs W
Greetings from the ORV Alguita!
In the past 24hrs, we have had our first series of debris encounters. While taking in our fishing lines for the night, we dragged in our first piece of debris; a deflated green balloon with the string still attached. It was a little disheartening to discover that we were fishing for trash instead of fish.
Last night at around 10pm, we passed the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). For those of you who are wondering what that means, we are now officially out of the US waters, in what is essentially the no-man's land of the Pacific. Because this area is out of US jurisdiction, it is not a top priority in terms of government funded research.
We were greeted in the morning with another debris sighting. We found a plastic water bottle which likely originated from Russia (the cap had Russian text). It had been afloat in the ocean just long enough for fouling organisms (i.e. tiny baby gooseneck barnacles) to latch on. Our next trash sighting, roughly 300 miles out to sea, was a tangle of fouled line and buoys. In addition to gooseneck barnacles making their home inside the floating mess, we found several pelagic crabs and a couple different of invertebrates. After weighing the mass of rubbish (9 kilos) we preserved a sample of the debris with the critters that we found living on it for Miriam Goldstein, a doctoral candidate at SCRIPPS, who is studying the fouling organisms that live on pelagic trash. The last two pieces of trash found today were a Monarch brand garlic-salt container and a plastic napkin or towel floating on the surface. These finds are indicators that we are making our way into the heart of trash accumulation.
As far as wildlife sightings go, we had a pod of Common Dolphins passing us on portside. We also spotted several Velella velella, also known as the By-the-wind sailors, which is an awesome little sea creature that has a small oval sail so it can use the winds to travel the seas.
Best Wishes from the Captain and crew
He is water sampling the entire way down and swimming ashore to visit 2K schools. Christopher is an incredibly charismatic spokesperson for ocean health and his story is amazing. Earlier this week Mashable ranked him as a top 75 environnmentalist on Twitter (@swimwithswain).
We are like a dog chasing its tail. To pay for the extra expense of the ocean cleanup and prevention of future pollution, we will need to GROW business. Right? We will never, ever be able to grow our way out of our problems but we can't help thinking that growth will work and so we continue.
to throw a tarp over
and use as a kind of
modern-day Kon-Tiki?
--
Meanwhile the earth is becoming a BIG outhouse, dumpster and hothouse at the SAME time.
Maybe there's another place that we can go.
NOT.
To those who will bitch about the increased costs: suck it up. Pay now or pay more later. We cannot solve these massive environmental problems until we start truly accounting for ALL the costs of doing business. It's a better option than having the government clean up all the trash... right?
i am working on a project with used cardboard. at the start i thought it would be hard to obtain enough used cardboard because i assumed that everyone recycled it. boy was i wrong!
These people deserve to teach the truth and be published instead of all that other crap. Just an opinion.
Thanks again!
Also sponges, but those don't work as well, or cloth pads, which are a nuisance to launder.
Check out Project Kaisei:
http://www.projectkaisei.org/index.html
It frustrates me that too often we are distracted by people with no interest in the facts who get to set the general consensus surrounding a particular subject. The talking heads from the media whose intent is often only to stir up as much controversy as possible - facts are boring.
But we should be seeking out people like Sylvia, who have spent lifetimes studying the oceans, to draw on their experience and what they have witnessed occurring as well as their fears for the future. 90% of the big fish gone from the ocean just in the last 50 years. We are such foolish creatures.
I do hope that this cause garners some attention.
A software disk was wrapped in 5 layers. It took 20 minutes to undo: scissors and knives failed to penetrate one thick hard plastic layer, only a box cutter worked. Installing the software was a breeze.
Fish can come in 5 layers. Opening the fish takes time and then the kitchen is littered with layers.
I've bought excellent cloth bags from the supermarket. I can load one cloth bag instead of 5 or 6 bags. Much easier to carry, take back and forth from the car. Still work to remember to take the cloth bags in with me.
We don't need all this packaging and waste. Some deli chains provide recycling bins for bottles; others don't.
I'm visiting in Canada now. Milk comes in a thin plastic bag which you put in a reusable container. Less trash.
Overpackaging with plastic is an unnecessary expense that costs my time. The price of oil is going to go up more and more as oil becomes scarce. It hurts our national economy to waste capital on this nonsense.
They were doing a piece on vending machines, at the end of the segment, they posted a statistic they blew me away.
Americans buy over 28 billion bottles from vending machines a year, enough to circle the globe 71 times.
Look forward to you next post.
the plastic industry should be taxed heavily to clean this up.
http://www.projectkaisei.org/index.html