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Mario Aguilera / Scripps Institution of Oceanography
SEAPLEX researchers encounter a large ghost net with tangled rope, net, plastic, and various biological organisms during a 2009 expedition in the Pacific gyre. Matt Durham (seen wearing a blue shirt) is pictured with Miriam Goldstein.
The amount of plastic trash in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased 100-fold during the past 40 years, causing "profound" changes to the marine environment, according to a new study.
Scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego found that insects called "sea skaters" or "water striders" were using the trash as a place to lay their eggs in greater numbers than before.
In a paper published by the journal Biology Letters, researchers said this would have implications for other animals, the sea skaters' predators -- which include crabs -- and their food, which is mainly plankton and fish eggs.
The scientists also pointed to a previous Scripps study that found nine percent of fish had plastic waste in their stomachs.
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" -- which is roughly the size of Texas -- was created by plastic waste that finds its way into the sea and is then swept into one area, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, by circulating ocean currents known as a gyre.
NOAA
This map shows the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone within the North Pacific Gyre.
The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, known as SEAPLEX, traveled about 1,000 miles west of California in August 2009.
A statement on Scripps' website said the scientists had "documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean."
Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, SEAPLEX’s chief scientist, said that plastic had arrived in the ocean in such numbers in a "relatively short" period.
Dec. 29, 2007: NBC's Kerry Sanders reports on a huge mass of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean that is killing marine life and growing larger each day.
"Plastic only became widespread in late '40s and early '50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we've seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic," she said. "Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better."
Jim Leichter / Scripps Institution of Oceanogra
Researchers found fish larvae growing on pieces of plastic, such as the one above.
Sea skaters -- relatives of pond water skaters -- normally lay their eggs on flotsam such as seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. The sharp rise in plastic waste had led to an increase in egg densities in the gyre area, the study found.
"We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic," Goldstein said in a statement.
She told BBC News that the addition of "hundreds of millions of hard surfaces" to the Pacific was "quite a profound change."
Samples taken by the scientists showed how marine life, such as small velella pictured above, lives alongside pieces of plastic.
"In the North Pacific, for example, there's no floating seaweed like there is in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. And we know that the animals, the plants and the microbes that live on hard surfaces are different to the ones that live floating around in the water," she added.
A garbage patch has also been found in the Atlantic Ocean, lying a few hundreds miles off the North American coast from Cuba to Virginia.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who said he coined the phrase the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," told msnbc.com by phone that the only solution was to switch to using biodegradable plastic and let the plastic gradually disperse.
"We can't clean it up. It's just too big. You'd have to have the entire U.S. Navy out there, round the clock, continuously towing little nets. And it's produced so fast, they wouldn't be able to keep up," he said.
Ebbesmeyer said in 10,000 years scientists might find a layer of plastic in the ground and use this as evidence of "the plastic people."
More world news from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold
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Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world
Leave a Comment:
My comment is the same no matter the topic (99% of the time)
When your confused FOLLOW THE MONEY
They do what they do--because they can--and sorry to inform you--they dont give a @!$%# about you,or your kids
Thats my america today
I suggest you dont use plastic or throw it away in/ at any government building
I live in olympia WA so there are plenty of them
Maybe Greenpeace ought to take its ships they use for protesting everything and go out and pick up some garbage.
I love a picture I saw from an Earth Day marathon. The streets and curbs were littered with water cups all the runners threw on the ground during this "Earth Day" marathon.
The first time I was on a U.S. Navy ship, I wandered to the back of it and was shocked to see a line of garbage in the water as far as the eye could see. Apparently, it's common practice for ships to throw garbage overboard rather than store it and dispose of it properly at the next port. I asked further and found out that ALL ships (military and cruise ships) from ALL countries practice this. I was absolutely dumbfounded!
So sending someone to clean up this mess is pointless as long as ships continue to throw their garbage overboard. Want change? ...invent a convenient device to make recycling portable or invent new bio-degradable products so that if we have to throw them away (litter) then at least it will degrade/decompose quicker than 50 or 100 years from now.
Other than that, anybody can say that somebody should make everybody change the way anybody with a little concern and common sense should have acted in the first place. Personal responsibility and accountability.
The problem was easy to create, the solution requires the real work.
The end of the world will come not by nuclear war, but by plastic shopping bag.....ROFLMAO.
And then the mess formed a large mosaic of the Virgin Mary, as seen by some Russian cosmonauts from space, and the impressed Pope proclaimed it a holy sight. Let the pilgrimages begin starting at $5k a pop, 25k for a luxury cabin with your own bed and toilet instead of a cot and a bilge
They could send a garbage grinder out there and pulverize it.
"If the plastic and the rest of the junk in the ocean is so bad, why doesn't someone go out there with some big ships and clean it up? Why wait until it reaches the US shores or somewhere else?
The Japanese have the money and resources to fix this - someone needs to make them clean it. Instead of using ships to kill dolphins, maybe the Japanese should get their act together and get their cr*p out of the"
The US coast guard goes out every year with huge shipping containers to pull out what they can. The problem is that plastic photodegrades so it is all little tiny particles floating around that pass right through the nets and things they use to pick it up. It is very hard to clean up the mess, while we should keep trying, the better long term solution is to cut down on our use of plastics and disposable items. ( take it from an environmental science teacher who is married to a field biologist)
For more in go to www.bagitmovie.com
And yet I still get the "stink-eye" from the kid at the grocery store for having the nerve to insist he pack my groceries in the reusable bags I bring. Mine are clean, and they stand up on their own - but still they look at me like I am an alien. But my favorite is when I go buy one item and they insist on putting it in a bag - "No I do NOT need a huge plastic bag to carry my pack of gum - thanks though."
The sea life will adapt to the garbage, it's called evolution!
people (with money and bought out whores said the same about the mississippi)
I was on an aircraft carrier for 6 months way back when. All day long there was a constant line of sailors waiting to toss their trash can's contents off the fan tail. A line of trash behind the ship as far as the eye could see
Oh but just think about all those TREES we've saved since the environmentalists gave us plastic alternatives. They're so smart...don't ya think? Talk about saving the planet.
Fishermen LOVE tossing empties once they start accumulating in the boat.Feels like-- freedom!
Remember when the Japanese used to have the concept of shame? So Tokyo must be filled with litter too is the stereotype I am formulating. And here I though Naples was bad, with the sink grey water merely tossed from apartment window into the street
And what's that crap about having to tale your shoes off before entering a Japanese home. That some sort of cultural joke? NEXT you will BS me, telling me the Japanese are very cleanly. Yeah right, and their pigs fly too
The crap of Japanese blue fin tuna eaters does not stink!
Now you know where all the garbage in california ends up -- you know -- that state full of enviromentalists...
This is what we get when the focus is corporate profits and a call for less environmental regulation. If people continue to elect more conservatives without consciences, we will see more and more pollution in our water and air. These people even want to take away our natural parks so they can drill more. It is amazing that some people never have enough money and are only focused on themselves. Hopefully more and more Americans will become educated about what is happening in this country and push to change this direction. Otherwise we will suffer more health illnesses which in time will lead to more deaths. How can I person who experienced cancer and have no compassion for others who have the disease or for those who have died due to the pollution from chemicals, etc.?
Do they even HAVE land fills in Japan or do they just dump EVERYTHING at sea due to limited space?
Cruise ships dumping their garbage into the ocean doesn't help matters!
They don't. They bring it back to land.
Pulling together the human race can solve any problem....that being said I am sure the gnop would vote no on any effort to clean the oceans.
As a sailor that crosses the Gulf of Mexico often the trash is here also.
So IF Man's litter is found on every beach in the world, THEN his soot must be found on every snowfield, glacier and ice cap on Earth. And we all KNOW that dirty snow - more specifically dirtier than the Status Quo snow--- melts faster than pristine snow, via the simplest of physics
With a little insight it's possible to see that we are made up of the environment. It seems that if the oceans, air and land get sick, we may too. I'm sure you are doing your best to keep the environment safe and clean. Recycling and using less plastic, perhaps. Problem seems overwhelming but we do our best. Lately I've gotten into biking for my routine travel. Getting me stronger and polluting less like many others http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=Ou1AvKDicxA
With all this discussion about the "Texas-sized" debris field of plastic garbage, where are the overhead pictures of this debris field accompanying articles like this? I've been hearing about this for quite some time and you would think with the vast modern technology available to us via Google Earth and others like it, there would be lots of high-res pictures of such a huge debris field. There's no question that there's garbage in the ocean. I just wonder if it's possible that the amount of debris is being hugely hyperbolized to advance the agenda that people are ultimately bad and destroying the earth with impunity. If there are pictures of such a huge debris field, I haven't been able to find them in an internet search. Perhaps someone can provide a link to these pictures.
What also needs to be realized (after reading a lot of posts) is that when there are Hurricanes etc... it blows garbage out to sea by the thousands of tons. Tornadoes suck up billions of tons and deposit it hundreds of miles away.
What about Katrina? Billions of tons went out then. All drainage sewers go out to nearby lakes, rivers etc... Where I live, we "have" to recycle.
We have some seriously windy and rainy days during the p-up of them (recycle day) that knock the cans over and blow & wash the recyclables down the street drains which go out to the river which flows out to the ocean. This plays a very large part in this story.
This is what all the wonderful people of the world have done together. Isn't this what the world peace lovers want? Everyone to come together in a joint project? Now we understand why world peace could never happen.
What's the United Nations job? Aren't they suppose to handle this multinational problem? I'm sure they could impose some type of international fine to cover the clean up costs. Isn't that the democratic way of solving problems? Or we can do nothing- the same as always and waste time blaming everyone but never really accomplishing anything.
OK all you out of work people-this one's for you. Lets see at 40 cents a bushell you could make a mint at the local recycle place. Everyone with boats get together and have a clean up year long recycle party. I'm sure the dems would give you a grant to cover the expenses to go out and pick everything up. They always say this stuffs important to them so here's a great way to make them prove all the crap they say they really mean.
Always trust a dude wearing a nature conservancy hat. We hitched a ride from two dudes after crawling out of the Grand Canyon to a trailhead completely out of water.It was 10 AM and they were already in the process of drunk driving, but it was either them or nothing. They had all kinds of beer and water in their truck and the driver wore a nature conservancy hat. We reached a road junction after 20 miles and they let us off to continue our trip, freshly re-hydrated and with lots of water on our backs.
As we left the driver tossed us a couple of brews but he INSISTED on one stipulation. under no circumstances were we to toss the empties! And so we carried them for 50 miles to the nearest trash can in Supai