Earth

Marcus Eriksen describes ocean plastic garbage

Marcus Eriksen: You get debris that leaves our coastal watersheds, goes out to sea, and gets stuck in the middle.

Plastic trash is collecting in vast areas of the north Pacific Ocean – and staying there – according to Marcus Eriksen of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in California.

Eriksen said this garbage in the north Pacific is less like a floating island, and more like a “soup” of plastic.

Marcus Eriksen: There are particles of cups of spoons and knives of plastic bags and plastic bottles, and they get smaller down to the basic plastic polymer, which is microscopic.

The circular movement of the ocean – in the form of an ocean gyre – is trapping all this plastic. Eriksen spoke of the large rotating ocean gyre that covers much of the north Pacific.

Marcus Eriksen: The size of the gyre is the entire garbage patch. It’s roughly twice the size of the United States.

Eriksen said the plastic doesn’t fully biodegrade and is often toxic. He said marine life feeds on it, including fish eaten by humans.

Marcus Eriksen: It’s absorbing PCBs, pesticides from farms, oil drops from cars like a sponge. Aa plastic particle, we have documented, can have up to a million times more pollutants stuck on it than ambient seawater. And because the Earth is spinning, that causes the oceans to spin. So you get these rotating gyres — they’re like giant toilet bowls that never flush.

Erikson said that one thing will help: curbing our use of disposable plastic.

Our thanks to:
Dr. Marcus Eriksen
Director of Education and Research
Algalita Marine Research Foundation
Long Beach, CA

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Posted 
August 31, 2009
 in 
Earth

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