• 88,000-mile journey? Plastic card makes landfall in Alaska after 33-year sea voyage

    James Poulson / Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP

    Beachcomber Emmitt Andersen, 12, holds up a plastic card set adrift by NOAA in the 1970s that he found in Sitka, Alaska.

    By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com

    A plastic card dropped into the ocean 33 years ago has been found on the coast of Alaska, after a potential 88,000-mile journey.

    The drift card was one of thousands put into the Bering Sea by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as part of a project to find out where oil would go if there was a spill.


    About the size of a postcard, it offered a reward of $1 for its return in three languages: English, Japanese and Russian.

    It was found on a beach at Sealion Cove, near Sitka, Alaska, last month by 12-year-old middle school student and keen beachcomber Emmitt Anderson. "We never know what we're going to find ... I just like to find stuff. When I don't find stuff, I'm not very happy," Anderson told the Daily Sitka Sentinel newspaper.

    'Amazingly good condition'
    His father Steve contacted NOAA and was put in touch with oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who tracks flotsam as it rides the world's currents.

    Ebbesmeyer told msnbc.com that Anderson's drift card had likely been caught in the Aleut gyre, circulating ocean currents that take three years to make an 8,000-mile orbit.

    "The question is how many times did it go around? I think it's likely it went around once, it could have gone round 11 times. It's possible it went 88,000 miles. It could have short-circuited the gyre … we'll never quite know," he said.

    Courtesy Curt Ebbesmeyer

    This plastic card may have traveled 88,000 mile, according to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.

    "Everything in the ocean, particularly plastic, can travel great, great distances," he added.

    Ebbesmeyer said the drift card was in "amazingly good condition."

    "After 33 years in the ocean, [it] is in quite readable condition," he said. "Plastic doesn't degrade very fast."

    Much of the plastic that finds its way into the sea will travel the world for years to come.

    "Half of all plastic cannot sink because of its specific gravity. It's as if it was in prison in Flatland [a fictional two-dimensional world]," Ebbesmeyer said.

    Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

    While Anderson's drift card did not make landing very far from where it was released, others have ended up in Europe.

    "Across the North Pole, down past Greenland, down to almost New York City, over to the vicinity of London, then turn south to France. That's probably the longest certifiable drift," Ebbesmeyer said.

    Even if the Sitka drift card traveled 88,000 miles that may not be the longest ever journey by a piece of plastic in the sea.

    Dec. 29: 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.

    An albatross found on Midway Island in the Pacific in 2004 was found to have 512 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

    One piece was discovered to have come from a downed aircraft from World War II. It was likely caught in the 12,000-mile turtle gyre, which takes about six years to make its full circle.

    Ebbesmeyer said that if that piece of plastic made 10 orbits in 60 years, that would mean it traveled 120,000 miles, equivalent to about five times round the Earth.

    Plastic ducks, frogs
    He also tracks some 28,800 plastic bath toys called Floatees – turtles, ducks, beavers and frogs – that were lost overboard from a container ship in the mid-Pacific in 1992. 

    Hundreds drifted some 2,200 miles and beached -- like Emmett Anderson's drift card -- near Sitka, Alaska.

    To date, a duck was seen in Maine in July 2003, while a green plastic frog was spotted in Scotland in August 2003.

    Ebbesmeyer, who usually gets one or two reports a year about the floating toys, said some of them may be approaching an epic achievement: Circumnavigating the globe.

    "It's possible they have gone something like in the order of round the world," he said.

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  • Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

    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.

    By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com

    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."

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