Pollution Adrift: Tracking the Rubber Duckie (Global Ocean Circulation)

[NC Susan]

Adrift away...

Want to know where your message in a bottle will turn up or track down the path of local floating pollution? Welcome to adrift, a website inspired by research into ocean circulation by Dr Erik Van Sebille and the delightful book Moby Duck about the true adventure of 28,800 rubber ducks lost at sea.
Here you can explore how all kinds of objects drift through the ocean - from rubber duckies to plastic pollution - and where each object might end up if it is washed out to sea from your beach.
The website uses a scientific method that is based on observed tracks revealed by buoys in the Global Drifter Program and other scientific research in this field. On this website you can see where ocean-going debris travelled after the Fukushima disaster or the path rubber ducks may have taken after the famous Friendly Floaties spill revealed in Moby Duck.
Happy Exploring, it is time to drift away!

Our oceans make up 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and are in constant motion. Driven by the sun and the wind our oceans develop mighty currents and eddies, some of which can take centuries to loop through all of our planet's ocean basins.
These currents also move through three dimensions. Many rise from the deep ocean near coastlines while other currents descend to the deepest parts of the ocean. These vertically descending currents are often, but not always, in the middle of the ocean in regions known as the five great gyres. These gyres are giant vortices spanning the whole ocean basin where water at the surface slowly spirals inwards until it sinks.
However, almost all plastic materials and lighter than water objects (such as those messages in a bottles) stay on the surface.
Since the late 1970s, ocean scientists have tracked drifting buoys but it wasn't until 1982 the World Climate Research Programme put forward the idea of a standardised global array of drifting buoys. These buoys float with the currents just like plastics except - like Twitter from the sea - they send a short message to scientists every six hours about where they are and the conditions in that location.
With this information, we have been able to create a statistical model of the surface pathways of our oceans. The Adrift website uses this model and generates an animation of the likely path and destination of floating debris over a ten year period into the future.
For the full details go to Erik Van Sebille's webpage or the paper Origin, dynamics and evolution of ocean garbage patches from observed surface drifters. If you have any further questions you can contact Erik van Sebille


Published on Jan 8, 2013
Just how much plastic is there floating around in our oceans? Dr Erik van Sebille from UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre has completed a study of ocean "garbage patches", and has found that in some regions the amount of plastic outweighs that of marine life.

MORE INFO:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7...
UNSW Climate Change Research Centre:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7...



link to interactive map here >>>


http://adrift.org.au/map?lat=34.6&lng=-141&center=-122.5


Duckies and Other Plastic

We show you a cute rubber duckie on the map, but the experiment you are doing when you click on the map is actually very sad. You are investigating how plastics move in the ocean.
The plastic litter is one of the biggest problems in our ocean. It can entangle marine animals, or they can mistake it for food and eat it. If that happens, the plastic gets into the food-chain, and in particular the chemicals in the plastics can be very harmful.
Fortunately, there are many groups of people that want to do something about this problem. They for instance clean up beaches, or try to reduce the amount of plastics we use in our daily live.
So, if you want to help out yourself, why not contact one of the organisations below?
5 Gyres
Tangaroa Blue
Surfrider Foundation
Plastic Oceans





Adrift.org.au is intended as an educational site. It should not be used for any policy decisions and comes without any warranty. Any inquiries should be directed to Dr Erik van Sebille at the University of New South Wales. Support for this site is provided by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

 

[VesperSparrow]

COOL! I am exploring now! Thanks!

 

[NC Susan]

http://news.yahoo.com/99-percent-ocean-plastic-disappeared-where-ending-scare-230613240.html


About 99 Percent of the Ocean’s Plastic Has Disappeared. Where It’s Ending Up Should Scare All of Us
By Kristina Bravo

01 Jul 2014

From water bottles to the microbeads in our face wash, we send millions of tons of plastic into the ocean every year. Not only does it amount to $13 billion in damages to the environment, but it costs the lives of the marine animals that end up choking on our garbage. A new study has found even grimmer news: About 99 percent of the ocean’s plastic is missing, and there’s a chance that a large amount is ending up on our dinner plates.

The study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported data collected from all major ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. When researchers used mesh nets to determine how much plastic the garbage patches have, they didn’t find as much trash as expected.

“We can’t account for 99 percent of the plastic that we have in the ocean,” lead researcher Carlos Duarte told Science. “There is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web.… And we are part of [it].”

According to Duarte, there’s a good chance that marine wildlife is eating the ocean’s plastic, which could look like fish food after waves and sunlight break it down into tiny pieces.

It’s indisputable that animals are eating our trash, according to oceanographer Peter Davison of the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research, but we don’t know the consequences. The ingested material could end up in the tuna that we eat, or as Davison told Science, plastic in fish “may dissolve back into the water…or for all we know they’re puking or pooping it out, and there’s no long-term damage. We don’t know.”

Where else could all that plastic be going? Microbes could be ingesting it. It could be washing ashore or degrading into nearly undetectable pieces. Animal feces could be dragging it down to the ocean floor.

Or are we simply producing less trash than scientists assume? The study, after all, used estimates of the amount of plastic entering the ocean from almost a half century ago.

“We’re desperately in need of a better estimate of how much plastic is entering the ocean annually,” oceanographer Kara Law told Science. “I don’t think we can conceive of the worst-case scenario, quite frankly. We really don’t know what this plastic is doing.”

It would be nice to assume that we’re learning our lesson and throwing away less of the pesky material. But solid evidence—just Google “Pacific Garbage Patch”—tells us that we don’t need more alarming statistics to force us into doing less damage to the planet.

 

[NC Susan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IjaZ2g-21E

<header class="article-header"> Adios, Pacific Garbage Patch: This Teenager’s Invention Could Clean It Up

A new report shows how the 19-year-old's gigantic cleanup machine can pick up half the North Pacific's trash.
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(Photo: The Ocean Cleanup/Facebook)
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June 12, 2014
By Kristina Bravo
http://www.takepart.com/article/201...ear-old-could-pick-half-pacific-garbage-patch

It sounds like an awesome but silly science fair idea: a massive machine that could clean up the ocean’s plastic trash.
Dutch teenager Boyan Slat proposed just that two years ago at his high school. Though the concept went on to win recognition from groups such as the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, many skeptics dismissed it as too ambitious. Now the 19-year-old is back with a 530-page feasibility report showing how the machine could work effectively; it includes statements from independent scientists who were asked to review it. Their verdict? Why, yes, the device could indeed pick up a significant percentage of the North Pacific’s plastic trash.
“Although the design is unable to remove the smallest microplastics from the ocean, the high efficiency of the barriers in dealing with larger plastics would significantly reduce the overall mass of plastic debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre,” concludes aerospace engineer Nicole Sharp in the study.
Slat hasn’t built a working structure yet, but 15 universities, engineering groups, and other institutions are already backing the Ocean Cleanup Array. Powered by solar panels, the platform would be attached to the seabed and have movable arms that could funnel recyclable plastic into a column. A floating barrier would prevent marine animals from getting trapped in the array. The project is budgeted to cost about $43 million annually for 10 years, which would be offset by the marketable and usable recycled plastic. According to Slat, one machine could take out half of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a decade.
The Ocean Cleanup Array project needs $2 million for a pilot phase, in which a global team would refine the design and carry out testing. “It wouldn’t be very cost-efficient to try to build our own engineering company and oceanographic institute,” Slat explains on the project's crowdfunding page.
“Instead, we seek collaborations with existing parties, enabling us to focus on the bigger picture.”
“Although a cleanup will have a profound effect, it is just part of the solution,” Slat said in a statement. “We also need to close the tap, to prevent any more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.”