Vibe magazine garbage patch

Installations like Jenny also do little to address the substantial accumulation of plastics on the ocean floor, reports Aria Bendix for Business Insider. Corryn Wetzel is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. Her work has also appeared in Audubon magazine, National Geographic and others. The device was developed by The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90 percent of floating ocean plastic by View this post on Instagram. Post a Comment. As microplastics and other trash collect on or near the surface of the ocean, they block sunlight from reaching plankton and algae below.

Algae and plankton are the most common autotrophs, or producers, in the marine food web. Autotrophs are organisms that can produce their own nutrients from carbon and sunlight. If algae and plankton communities are threatened, the entire food web may change. Animals that feed on algae and plankton, such as fish and turtles, will have less food. If populations of those animals decrease , there will be less food for apex predators such as tuna, sharks, and whales.

Eventually, seafood becomes less available and more expensive for people. These dangers are compounded by the fact that plastics both leach out and absorb harmful pollutants. As plastics break down through photodegradation, they leach out colorants and chemicals, such as bisphenol A BPA , that have been linked to environmental and health problems. Conversely, plastics can also absorb pollutants, such as PCBs, from the seawater.

These chemicals can then enter the food chain when consumed by marine life. Many individuals and international organizations, however, are dedicated to preventing the patch from growing. Cleaning up marine debris is not as easy as it sounds. Many microplastics are the same size as small sea animals, so nets designed to scoop up trash would catch these creatures as well.

Even if we could design nets that would just catch garbage, the size of the oceans makes this job far too time-consuming to consider. Many expeditions have traveled through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Charles Moore, who discovered the patch in , continues to raise awareness through his own environmental organization, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. During a expedition , Moore and his team used aerial drones, to assess from above the extent of the trash below.

The drones determined that there is times more plastic by weight than previously measured. The team also discovered more permanent plastic features, or islands, some over 15 meters 50 feet in length. Scientists and explorers agree that limiting or eliminating our use of disposable plastics and increasing our use of biodegradable resources will be the best way to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Organizations such as the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the Plastic Oceans Foundation are using social media and direct action campaigns to support individuals, manufacturers, and businesses in their transition from toxic , disposable plastics to biodegradable or reusable materials. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2. Quotable Captain "So on the way back to our home port in Long Beach, California, we decided to take a shortcut through the gyre, which few seafarers ever cross.

Fishermen shun it because its waters lack the nutrients to support an abundant catch. Sailors dodge it because it lacks the wind to propel their sailboats. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world's leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the 'eastern garbage patch.

Strange Cargo When ships are caught in storms, they often lose cargo to the oceans. The following are just a few of the strange items that have washed up on shores:. Also called an alpha predator or top predator. Scientists have discovered that coastal critters and plants like crabs, anemones and seaweed have found a way to survive in the open ocean by colonizing rafts of floating plastic debris.

An accumulation of trash known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is acting as a new type of ecosystem, ferrying species hundreds of miles from their usual coastal habitat into the high seas. In the work published this month in Nature Communications , researchers found that marine species like barnacles, brittle stars and shrimp-like crustaceans called isopods living among the garbage patch that floats roughly halfway between the coast of California and Hawaii.

A new study , published in the journal Nature Communications , now found that a growing number of marine animals calls this layer of floating garbage their home — yet another example of how adaptive nature can be when faced with man-made challenges that disrupt ecosystems. After collecting tonnes of plastic debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in one year, the researchers involved in the study analysed the species found on the floating plastic items in a marine lab. They were surprised to find a wide range of marine species living on the items, including hydroids, amphipods as well as anemones.

The researchers further established that numerous coastal plants and species colonise these plastic items floating in the open ocean. Usually contained to a certain geographical zone, these coastal organisms could potentially explore new frontiers. Although the transport of coastal species across oceans and along coasts on floating debris, also known as ocean rafting, has long been known to occur on natural rafts, including seeds, trees, seaweeds and pumice, past documented occurrences were assumed to be ephemeral.