The Ocean is broken...

[Rangiroo]

This is so damn sad....please share.....

The ocean is broken | Newcastle Herald

[DeepFrz]

Horrifying...

[delmarrey]

The last sentence ........

"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.

"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

But it's OK to ship tons of Chinese junk across vast oceans.

[sabray]

See what happens to the e cycled junk we buy from the Chinese. Some they get it back and then it gets scary. A lot of this stuff just gets chucked into our landfills 80 to 85 percent.

[Blue Stocking]

Where would you put the collected garbage ????

[europaflyer]

Shame he has no pictures to verify his claims. Although ocean pollution is a massive problem, he seems to be claiming that his entire trans-Pacific route followed one big garbage patch where you can't start your engine for fear of hitting a submerged object. This seems an exaggeration of the truth...

[Delancey]

Breaks my heart.

[scoobert]

Sigh. The pacific garbage patch is mostly below the surface. And the trash breaks down over time. Even plastic. Dont think so, leave a pvc dingy in the equatorial sun, watch what happens

[tropicalescape]

I take this as " belive half of what you see and None of what you hear !! If it was so bad where are the pictures, the underwater footage, a sample, all I see is some guy with his selfie and his boat...Its like the little old lady from days past "wheres the beef"? ...He wont be helping the cause until he shows us what he described and proves it...Of course we could just "blindly dedicate ourselves" to what he/others tell us without any proof,would have been so easy for them to add a few shots of such activity and I would not be such a cynic...Dont mean to offend anyone and dont wont to be "offended by anyone"(without a little proof anyways)..

[robert sailor]

There is one area in the Pacific that the currents seem to keep the junk together, mostly plastic. Its a large area about half way between Vancouver and Hawaii but compared to the size of the ocean its not that big. Having said that there seems to be more junk every year.

[minaret]

Originally Posted by scoobert

Sigh. The pacific garbage patch is mostly below the surface. And the trash breaks down over time. Even plastic. Dont think so, leave a pvc dingy in the equatorial sun, watch what happens

Plastic breaking down creates more problems, not less.



Microplastics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[europaflyer]

Originally Posted by tropicalescape

If it was so bad where are the pictures, the underwater footage, a sample, all I see is some guy with his selfie and his boat...

As keen an environmentalist as I am, I have to agree here...

If I saw a 'factory chimney' sticking out of the water with 'some kind of boiler thing' attached below the surface, I would probably crack out the camera. As this thread makes page 1 of google on the title, we can only hope the author is reading this so...

PICTURES OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN!

[highseas]

Check out Midway Island.A good indicator of what is in the ocean.Lots of pictures and video.Have humans turned into ostriches?We can only hope to get a handle on this before,"All is Lost".

[olepedersen]

The point is the ocean is changing I have sailed north americas east coast in small boats since 1964 and europe before that.my family was fishing from Denmark to Greenland in my childhood.the trawls were ever made more efficient they can be made to slide on the seabead.Like a bulldozer in the garden, the latest fishing boats dont even try to sort catch they grind it all up and sell the mix. average fish size recorded get smaller and smaller in all
species . Debris can in areas be as bad as he says and it is recorded. Ihave personnally
seen 45 gal drums and containers floating on the eastern seabord. and I am installing a line cutter on my shaft.this year as I am getting too old to dive and cut line and nets floating loose off. So let's look after it better. I think it was his point. Ole

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by minaret

Plastic breaking down creates more problems, not less.



Microplastics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which says:

". . . as little is known about its effects"

"However, long term impacts on marine organisms are currently unknown."

"However, this is of more importance for larger plastic debris"

"At current levels, microplastics are unlikely to be an important global geochemical reservoir for POPs"

Maybe it's worth worrying about microplastics, when we actually know that there's anything to worry about?


By which I do not mean to say that there is nothing at all to worry about. Of course, we should do more to keep garbage out of the ocean, particularly non-bio-degradable plastics, and I think probably everyone would agree about that. The main cuprit in putting garbage into the Pacific are third world countries which can't afford and/or don't bother to dispose of plastics properly.

An international effort to reduce the amount of plastic dumped into the oceans would probably not cost a ridiculous amount of money.

But to say that the ocean is "broken" seems quite hyperbolic. The concentration of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is something like 5.5kg per square kilometer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_P..._Garbage_Patch). Exaggerating these problems merely discredits the very worthwhile effort to solve them.