Everyone remember the great garbage pile in the Pacific Ocean? It turns out that they just discovered one in the Atlantic Ocean as well.
Researchers are warning of a new blight at sea: a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
The floating garbage — hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents — was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.
The hazards from this debris are numerous and run all the way from the bottom of the food chain to the very top, human beings:
- It can interfere with photochemically available radiation (sunlight) reaching surface and subsurface plants.
- Contaminants remaining on the surface of the debris can wash off the containers and enter the food chain, for everything from motor oil to antifreeze to arsenic in treated wood.
- Contaminants in the manufacturing of the material itself will gradually dissolve and enter the water, where it may also enter the food chain.
- It interferes with the availability of oxygen near the surface, and at deeper levels.
- Sea life that depends upon penetrating the surface, i.e. birds that catch fish, whales that must rise to the surface, will not be able to do so, almost certainly causing a decline in their numbers.
And of course the worst stuff is almost invisible to the naked eye:
But the most nettlesome trash is nearly invisible: countless specks of plastic, often smaller than pencil erasers, suspended near the surface of the deep blue Atlantic.
While this is not the worst that we do to the oceans, the fact that we are so dependent on them will eventually come back to haunt us if we don't do a better job protecting them. Chances are, more garbage piles will be discovered, and probably throughout every major body of water on earth.
About the only news that is not quite as bad, is that the patches in the Atlantic will likely be smaller, allowing for some mitigation of the worst effects.
Charles Moore, an ocean researcher credited with discovering the Pacific garbage patch in 1997, said the Atlantic undoubtedly has comparable amounts of plastic. The east coast of the United States has more people and more rivers to funnel garbage into the sea. But since the Atlantic is stormier, debris there likely is more diffuse, he said.