Scientists Find 'Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch'

ScienceDaily 28 Aug 09;

Scientists have just completed an unprecedented journey into the vast and little-explored "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch."

On the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX), researchers got the first detailed view of plastic debris floating in a remote ocean region.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

The Scripps research vessel (R/V) New Horizon left its San Diego homeport on August 2, 2009, for the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, located some 1,000 miles off California's coast, and returned on August 21, 2009.

Scientists surveyed plastic distribution and abundance, taking samples for analysis in the lab and assessing the impacts of debris on marine life.

Before this research, little was known about the size of the "garbage patch" and the threats it poses to marine life and the gyre's biological environment.

The expedition was led by a team of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) graduate students, with support from University of California Ship Funds, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Project Kaisei.

"SEAPLEX was an important education experience for the graduate students, and contributed to a better understanding of an important problem in the oceans," said Linda Goad, program director in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences. "We hope that SEAPLEX will result in increased awareness of a growing issue."

After transiting for six days aboard the research vessel, the researchers reached their first intensive sampling site on August 9th.

Team members began 24-hour sampling periods using a variety of tow nets to collect debris at several ocean depths.

"We targeted the highest plastic-containing areas so we could begin to understand the scope of the problem," said Miriam Goldstein of SIO, chief scientist of the expedition. "We also studied everything from phytoplankton to zooplankton to small midwater fish."

The scientists found that at numerous areas in the gyre, flecks of plastic were abundant and easily spotted against the deep blue seawater.

Among the assortment of items retrieved were plastic bottles with a variety of biological inhabitants. The scientists also collected jellyfish called by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella).

On August 11th, the researchers encountered a large net entwined with plastic and various marine organisms; they also recovered several plastic bottles covered with ocean animals, including large barnacles.

The next day, Pete Davison, an SIO graduate student studying mid-water fish, collected several species in the gyre, including the pearleye (Benthalbella dentata), a predatory fish with eyes that look upward so it can see prey swimming above, and lanternfish (Tarletonbeania crenularis), which migrate from as deep as 700 meters down to the ocean surface each day.

By the end of the expedition, the researchers were intrigued by the gyre, but had seen their fill of its trash.

"Finding so much plastic there was shocking," said Goldstein. "How could there be this much plastic floating in a random patch of ocean--a thousand miles from land?"
Adapted from materials provided by National Science Foundation.

Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers
Michelle Rindels, Associated Press Yahoo News 28 Aug 09;

LOS ANGELES – A tawny stuffed puppy bobs in cold sea water, his four stiff legs tangled in the green net of some nameless fisherman.

It's one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.

Most of the trash has broken into bite-sized plastic bits, and scientists want to know whether it's sickening or killing the small fish, plankton and birds that ingest it.

During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected. The team announced their observations at a San Diego press conference Thursday.

"It's pretty shocking — it's unusual to find exactly what you're looking for," said Miriam Goldstein, who led fellow researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego on the three-week voyage.

While scientists have documented trash's harmful effects for coastal marine life, there's little research on garbage patches, which were first explored extensively by self-trained ocean researcher Charles Moore just a decade ago. There's also scant research on the marine life at the bottom of the food chain that inhabit the patch.

But even the weather-beaten, sunbleached plastic flakes that are smaller than a thumbnail can be alarming.

"They're the right size to be interacting with the food chain out there," Goldstein said.

The team also netted occasional water bottles with barnacles clinging to the side. Some of the trash had labels written in Chinese and English, hints of the long journeys garbage takes to arrive mid-ocean.

Plastic sea trash doesn't biodegrade and often floats at the surface. Bottlecaps, bags and wrappers that end up in the ocean from the wind or through overflowing sewage systems can then drift thousands of miles.

The sheer quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex formed by ocean and wind currents and located 1,000 miles off the California coast, has the scientists worried about how it might harm the sea creatures there.

A study released earlier this month estimated that thousands of tons of plastic debris wind up in the oceans every year, and some of that has ended up in the swirling currents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, told the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society last week that plastic actually does decompose, releasing potentially toxic chemicals that can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and marine life.

The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle?

Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year.

The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger.

"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.

Only humans are to blame for ocean debris, Goldstein said. In a blog entry posted a day before the science ship arrived in Newport, Ore., she wrote the research showed her the consequences of humanity's footprint on nature.

"Seeing that influence just floating out here in the middle of nowhere makes our power painfully obvious, and the consequences of the industrial age plain," she wrote. "It's not a pretty sight."

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On the Net:

• Scripps Institution of Oceanography, http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/

Plastics patch found across 1,700 miles of Pacific
Steve Gorman, Reuters 28 Aug 09;

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Ocean scientists recently back from a voyage to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" said on Thursday they had found plastic debris strewn across a 1,700-mile (2,700-km) long stretch of open sea.

The research team from the three-week Seaplex expedition said more work remains to be done to determine the full extent of the trash vortex, how it affects marine life and how it might safely be removed from the ocean.

Cleanup will be difficult because the "vast majority of things we saw were small, about the size of your thumbnail or smaller," Miriam Goldstein, the expedition's chief scientist, told reporters at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

"We found a lot of particles that were about the size of the animals that are living out there, so that would certainly present a challenge to removing those particles," she said.

The 172-foot (52-meter) research vessel New Horizon returned to shore last Friday from a trip to the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, a giant eddy-like expanse of sea about midway between Japan and the West Coast of the United States.

Debris winds up concentrated there by circular, clockwise ocean currents that form an oblong-shaped "convergence zone."

"Our human footprint is now apparent in even one of the most remote places on the planet," said Doug Woodring, director of Project Kaisei, which co-sponsored the Seaplex study.

He joined the New Horizon crew, and his group's ship returns from its own expedition next week. That boat, the Kaisei, has been experimenting with possible debris-skimming cleanup methods, he said.

The existence of the vast, remote debris field, widely referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," was first publicized by ocean activist Charles Moore, who discovered the area by accident in 1997.

He has said some of his samples from the area contained six times more plastic by weight than zooplankton. But the exact scope of the phenomenon remains unclear.

TWICE THE CALIFORNIA COASTLINE

Goldstein said the crew of the New Horizon hauled up plastic debris in 100 consecutive surface samples taken across 1,700 miles of the ship's cruise track -- roughly twice the length of the California coastline but just a fraction of the gyre. Relatively little sampling was done beneath the surface.

"We can't necessarily say very much about the extent of the area covered by marine debris," she said.

Scientists will spend months studying samples to determine what harm the plastic may be doing to marine life, much of it tiny, jelly-like organisms classified as zooplankton.

Many such creatures found there are not well known to science, Goldstein said.

During one glassy-calm day at sea, she recalled, the water was littered with plastic specks, "like little flecks of confetti or snow, just floating on the surface, and beneath them you could see these really interesting critters just going about their business."

"So it was, I thought, a very striking combination of a cool, basic science discovery, and then this undeniable sign of human impact," she said.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Todd Eastham)