Plastics in the Sargasso Sea. Researchers knew about this… WHEN?!
It’s Science Wednesday here at Fake Plastic Fish! Thanks to Wallace “J.” Nichols for forwarding the following article to me. Nichols is the Founder/Co-Director of OceanRevolution.org.
Here’s a summary of the article. Based on what we know about marine plastic, can you guess when it was written?
ABSTRACT Plastic particles, in concentrations averaging 3500 pieces and 290 grams per square kilometer, are widespread in the western Sargasso Sea. Pieces are brittle, apparently due to the weathering of the plasticizers, and many are in a pellet shape about 0.25 to 0.5 centimeters in diameter. the particles are surfaces for the attachment of diatoms and hydroids. Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentrations of these particles. Plastics could be a source of some of the polychlorinated biphenyls recently observed in oceanic organisms.
Did you guess? Now click here for the full article (PDF) or here for the full citation. Be sure and check out the date.
Don’t have time to read the whole thing? Here’s the key point:
Many plastics contain considerable concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s) as plasticizers. If the plasticizers have been lost to seawater, as suggested above, the incorporation of PCB’s by marine organisms is possible. Polychlorinated biphenyls have recently been observed in pelagic Sargassum and oceanic animals.
Here are a few definitions, for those who might not be familiar with all these words:
Pelagic means “Of, relating to, or living in open oceans or seas rather than waters adjacent to land or inland waters.”
Sargassum are “brown algae with rounded bladders forming dense floating masses in tropical Atlantic waters as in the Sargasso Sea.”
PCB‘s are persisten organic pollutants which bioaccumulate in animals and make their way up the food chain to poison us. Before they were banned, they were used as an additive in PVC.
Makes you want sushi, doesn’t it? What each of us should be asking is, if scientists have known about the problem of plastics in the ocean for so long, why are most of us just learning about it now? My first exposure to this issue was in 2007 upon reading the article, Plastic Ocean.
When did you first hear about it?
fake plastic fish is so stuipd, in the ocean. It loooks horrible.
Massive plastic pollution of Earth’s oceans seems to be subdued knowledge. Key people have known about this problem first-hand for over twetnty years. It was really bad back then, so it must be really, REALLY bad today.
Amazingly, I saw a science website article published in 2009 claiming that scientists JUST DISCOVERED the “North Pacific Garbage Patch”, which was well traveled and described in painstaking detail in the 1980’s!!
How can a science publication be so stupid as to make this claim– as though the “Garbage Patch” were very recent knowledge?
Most people do NOT travel the oceans, let alone travel vast stretches of oceans, to actually see the ocean. We are so isolated on land in our own lives that we very literally CANNOT see the vastness of the water and the vastness of the pollution. We cannot ACTUALLY see it, until it floats up onto shore, and by this time, it will be too late to act to reverse the problem.
Oceans are so amazingly large, and people are so amazingly isolated on land that a HUGE, HUGE problem can remain invisible right up until the moment before it starts to destroy us. It’s sort of like cancer that can remain hidden beneath the surface of a human body until it inundates the body at a critical peak of infection.
This seems to be the most insidious global water pollution crisis in the history of mankind, and so very few people seem to know about it. Most people are, therefore, like cancer victims who do NOT see it coming.
WAKE UP, people!