Article reprinted from "China National Geographic BOOK"
A "plastic plague" is raging in the oceans.
In 1992, a cargo ship was hit by a strong storm in the Pacific Ocean when a container filled with 30,000 plastic little yellow duck toys fell into the ocean.
Since then, more than 30,000 little yellow ducks have split into two teams and started their journey to the ocean. Among them, more than 20,000 small yellow ducks flow along the subtropical circulation of the Pacific Ocean, passing through indonesia, Australia, South America and other places;
A trip to the ocean with the rubber little yellow duck
Figure\Visual China
Another "Little Yellow Duck Fleet" traveled north through the Bering Strait, into the Arctic Ocean, around Greenland and Iceland, and finally into the North Atlantic.
In 1997, American captain Charles Moore sailed out of Hawaii with his Alguita, and he tried to cut a short road to bring it back to the United States from the equator without wind, but he accidentally fell into a pile of "garbage" and could not move forward, almost like "a pot of plastic porridge".
Why is this garbage stuck here? How did it become a "garbage belt" that could not be seen at a glance?
Before it was widely concerned by humans, this garbage area was still waiting for more new "partners" to join. For example, the "Little Yellow Duck Fleet" lost in the Pacific Ocean.
In 2007, Penny Harris, a 60-year-old British teacher, was walking her dog on the beach when she accidentally spotted a yellow plastic toy duck floating in the water, and nearly 10,000 small yellow ducks landed on the shores of the United Kingdom in the past few years.
Where do these little yellow ducks drifting on the sea go?
Where did the huge remaining "Little Yellow Duck Fleet" go? Many people speculate that they may have found their home in "that pot of garbage porridge".
This speculation has attracted attention around the world, and in 2009 the huge marine dump, hidden in the center of the Pacific subtropical air current, took on the new name "Eighth Continent."
A "ghost nation" in the Pacific?
According to rough estimates by scientists, the "Eighth Continent" is composed of 4 million tons of plastic waste and covers an area of 1.4 million square kilometers, equivalent to two U.S. states of Texas, about four Japanese sizes, and 1,000 times the size of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The blue square in the picture is the "Pacific Garbage Belt".
图\JOHN BLANCHARD/The Chronicle
It covers only 0.5% of the world's ocean surface, but is estimated to contain more than 50% of all the plastic floating on the high seas.
The "Eighth Continent" is also known as the Pacific Garbage Belt (GPGP).
图\Ocean Cleanup Foundation
How exactly did this "garbage continent" come into being? It starts with the current.
Ocean currents are currents formed by moving seawater, ocean surface currents formed by wind, gulf streams, and other boundary currents flow along the edges of the shelf. The combined effect of Earth's gravity and other mechanical factors drives ocean currents to do horizontal spirals.
In this way, the trend of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean is more obvious.
Figure\NOAA Map
Dozens of large and small surface currents can make the upper ocean water circulate rapidly, at the same time, the "water mass" in the deep ocean circulates through the hot salt circulation (hot salt circulation refers to the density of seawater when it becomes cold, and decreases when it becomes hot, and the force generated by this change can promote the movement of huge "water masses". Moving slowly in the world's oceans.
Schematic diagram of all ocean currents in today's world.
Figure\Wikipedia
Five of the world's six major surface currents form a circulation that drives the constant movement of the surface waters of the global ocean. The North Atlantic and North Pacific circulation cycle clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.
Light blue represents the total amount of plastic produced, dark blue is the amount of plastic wasted by poor management, gray is plastic waste entering the hydrosphere, and red is plastic waste entering the ocean. This form is called a plastic funnel. The 400 million-ton plastic economy has turned into a 1 million-ton marine plastic problem.
And this movement slowly gathers plastic waste from the Asian continent and the American continent. Just as we turn the cup with the tea leaves in our hands clockwise, we will see that the tea leaves will gather in the center of the cup in a short while, and the same is true.
Cross-section of the Great Pacific Garbage Belt (GPGP).
Left, Hawaii. Right, north American west coast.
According to the British "Daily Mail", the American captain Charles Moore led the research team he created, "Algalita", to the "Eighth Continent" for 30 days of research.
Captain Charles Moore of America.
They plan to take samples of plastic waste and compare them with samples taken in 1999, 2008 and 2009, with the ultimate goal of integrating the new data with previous studies to assess trends in the Pacific Circulation System.
Photographs taken by charles moore's nonprofit organization.
Garbage has a serious impact on marine ecology.
Moore's team found that there is more plastic waste on the ocean surface than ever thought.
The relationship between poorly managed plastic waste and GDP per capita.
They were disturbed by the 418-kilometer range taken at the circulation-centered, with plastic waste weighing thousands of times more than phytoplankton.
No wonder Captain Moore would say, "If plastic litter pollution is not stopped, the ocean could become a new floating world." ”
Veined octopus in an empty jar.
The nickname of this "Eighth Continent" is really ironic, but in order to awaken people's awareness of the protection of the marine environment, something more dramatic happened.
Let the garbage heap become a country.
In September 2017, the British press and entertainment publishing agency and the Environmental Foundation actually submitted a "special" application to the United Nations .
They requested the establishment of the 196th country on earth on this "eighth continent" of garbage, directly called the "Republic of the Garbage Islands".
Former U.S. Deputy Prime Minister Al Gore also signed the petition and became an honorary citizen of The Garbage Island.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr., American politician,
He was Vice President from 1993 to 2001.
As soon as the news came out, 120,000 people around the world wanted to join the country and apply to become its legal citizens in a short period of time.
The first two advocates of the campaign, advertising experts Michael Hughes and Dalatando Almeida, designed a series of "peripheral" products for the "Republic of the Garbage Islands" that meet the national standards.
For example, the national flag, a plastic bottle upside down in the blue ocean;
Passports, for example, are made of biodegradable materials with the country's motto "The ocean needs us";
For example, the currency of the Republic of the Garbage Islands is called "Debris", which means debris, wreckage. Even the pattern on the currency is very much in line with the theme of marine environmental protection:
For example, the currency pattern of 20 yuan is octopus with plastic garbage and turtles entangled in plastic;
The 20 yuan coin pattern is from a real picture.
Garbage Island Ambassador Sarah Sarah Roberts argues that if the garbage island can be officially recognized as a country by the United Nations, they can ensure that the issue is not ignored again.
The ocean and garbage in the 100 yuan pattern are also shocking to watch.
This wave of discussion of the Pacific garbage belt is too big to unsurprisingly raise questions and controversies. Because there is a team of professionals who claim that -
The so-called shocking "Eighth Continent" garbage belt does not exist at all!
The marine litter belt we often see in the news looks like this:
We often see garbage strips in the news.
However, they propose that the marine debris belt in reality should look like this:
But in fact, it may look like normal seawater, and you can't see a large piece of garbage.
Looking around, we can't see a single piece of plastic, let alone a floating plastic continent, but that doesn't mean the sea is clean and calm.
Due to the influence of seawater and sunlight, plastics break down into tiny particles that are distributed in the ocean in a "cloud-like" pattern, so the biggest headache for environmentalists involved in fishing is how to collect smaller debris in the ocean.
Composition of the internal GPGP. Of these, about 5-10% of the total mass is microplastics.
Because their existing tools are traditional fishing gear, they can't do anything about tiny pieces.
This method of fishing only catches large volumes of garbage.
Whether or not this is the true appearance of the Pacific Garbage Belt, at least this "ghostly" existence, its harm is constantly expanding, and even triggered a "plastic plague" that occurs on the ocean.
A "plastic plague" is taking place in the ocean
"The garbage in the ocean can circle the earth 400 times" is not an imitation of a milk tea slogan, but a sentence said by Sarah Roberts, the ambassador of the "Garbage Islands Republic".
Plastic will break down very little.
This is a veritable "plastic plague".
To prevent this horrific marine litter disaster from continuing to spread, The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization, was born in 2013 by a 29-year-old Dutch youth, Boyan Slat, who has been working on plastic debris in the "Pacific Garbage Belt."
Boyan Slat, founder of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation.
The harm of plastics is mainly manifested in two aspects: one is that plastics in marine litter belts are highly persistent; the other is that floating plastics become more harmful over time;
We are all familiar with the fact that plastics are so stable and durable that the oldest object discovered by researchers in their exploration of GPGPs is a buoy from 1966.
Buoys captured in the Great Pacific garbage belt.
Is this an example?
In fact, the high persistence of plastics is beyond our imagination.
A Dutch team reconstructed the marine environment in the lab and measured the degradation of various plastic objects over time.
They found that the weight loss of plastic items typically observed at sea is less than 1 percent per year, suggesting that polyethylene, the most common type of plastic in the ocean, can take "centuries" to completely degrade.
Small fish will eat algae attached to plastic bags.
The scariest thing is more than that, as time goes on, the sun and waves can break down objects into smaller and smaller pieces.
A plastic box, for example, ends up turning into hundreds of thousands of microplastic particles (if a piece of microplastics ranges in size from 500 micrometers to 5 millimeters, we find that its average weight is 0.00353 grams, and if a plastic box weighs 2 kilograms, it can produce nearly 600,000 microplastics of this size).
Not only are microplastic particles more harmful, but they are also more difficult to clean. The smaller the fragments become, the less buoyancy they have. In 2019, researchers spanned GPP, measured from the surface to a depth of 2,000 meters, and found microplastics that were "snowing."
Went to sea to study the Ocean Cleanup Foundation fleet of the GPGP.
Although the amount of these microplastics suspended in the deep ocean is less than 10% of the total mass of plastics. But if the surface plastic is not removed as soon as possible, the other 90% of the total will eventually sink into the ocean.
Albatross and a belly "plastic"
The accidental death of an albatross in 2001 made people realize that the deadly dangers of plastic are lurking in every corner, not even a bird:
A piece of plastic was found in the albatross's stomach from a seaplane that was shot down in 1944.
On the cover of the June 2009 issue of the Royal Society Philosophy Journal, a picture that appears to be a mosaic of color was published.
Cover image of the special issue of the Royal Society Philosophical Journal, June 2009.
Photo\Photographer Rebecca Hosking
If you look closely, it turns out that this is a puzzle composed of plastic products such as toothbrushes and bottle caps, which were taken from the abdomen of a dead juvenile albatross.
Polish scientists have found that 95 percent of petrels have plastic in their stomachs. Scientists found 1,600 pieces of plastic residue in the stomach of a bird in Belgium.
In 2008, in an art project called Midway Journey, Manuel Maqueda, one of the founders of the Plastic Pollution Alliance,which aims to achieve a world free of plastic pollution, teamed up with visual photographer Chris Jordan to explore the impact of human plastic waste on a remote island.
A dead albatross, its stomach filled with a lot of plastic garbage that killed them.
Photo: Chris Jordan, a famous American environmental photographer
Their team photographed thousands of young albatrosses dying on the ground, their stomachs filled with plastic.
"This experience was devastating, not only because of what it means for the suffering of birds, but also because it reflects to us the destructive power of our mass consumer culture and the damaged relationship between humans and the world in which they live."
Many dead albatross chicks commonly find plastic waste such as bottle caps, plastic lighters, plastic children's toys, combs, and toothbrushes. Swallowing these plastic products can cause the birds' esophagus or organs to be punctured, causing them to suffocate or die of starvation or dehydration.
These seabirds can't tell which are food and which are harmful pieces of plastic.
When the mother seabird brings back food from the ocean thousands of miles away, that is, the plastic pieces collected will be fed directly to the small seabirds, and the hungry and panicked little seabirds can't wait to take a bite, bite and spit out; so the seabird mother uses her mouth to peck the plastic pieces into pieces, and then feeds them to the small seabirds one by one.
You can see that there is garbage in the food.
This plastic fragment is not immune to being eaten by seabirds, not to mention that the plastic will break down into smaller particles. The number of plastic fragments is too large, far more than plankton, and even the center of the whirlpool is more than 3.43 million square kilometers.
And these small particles will be eaten by small fish into the stomach, seabirds will eat small fish, big fish will also eat small fish, so that toxic plastic particles will enter the entire food chain, and finally some seafood will be served on our table.
Hand-drawn marine food chain.
Therefore, not only the various creatures that rely on the ocean, but even human beings are difficult to avoid suffering from it, whether we eat seafood or not, we may ingest plastic harmful substances.
In fact, seawater can also be polluted, and this is closely related to each of us, because the salt we are consuming every day may come from these polluted seawater.
Researchers at East China Normal University bought 15 brands of table salt in supermarkets and found that each kilogram of sea salt contained 550 to 681 microplastics.
This marine litter is not far away from us.
Therefore, the plastic waste in the ocean will be pervasive in our lives.
By 2018, only 9% of the 9 billion tons of plastic products produced worldwide were recycled, about 12% were incinerated, and the remaining 79% eventually accumulated in landfills or flowed directly into the natural environment.
It is imperative to clean up the GPGpPs, because the entire garbage strip is still piling up and decomposing at the same time.
The future scenario of medium and large plastics in the GPGP. Dark bands show what happens without any changes.
Addressing the source (left) causes the amount of marine pollution to remain the same.
Combining source reduction with clean-up (right) leads to a decline in marine pollution.
At this moment, most plastic is two meters above the ocean, and if this plastic spreads to a height of 2,000 meters, the amount of water we need to clean up will increase a thousandfold.
Cleaning up marine litter requires a lot of money and manpower.
In other words, cleaning up a vertically dispersed area would require a thousand times more work than cleaning up today's marine litter belt!
So cleaning up the surface waters of the GPGP now can prevent 2D problems from turning into 3D problems, and there is a short opportunity to deal with the plastic left behind, and before it becomes a microplastic and pollutes the entire water body indefinitely, find a way to say "bye-bye" to 90% of the marine plastic waste.
In the 2018 film "Isle of Dogs" directed by Wes Anderson, the garbage island where dogs are exiled has aroused a lot of netizens' discussion:
Isn't that what that garbage island in the Pacific Ocean looks like?
A huge garbage island in Isle of Dogs.
Picture \Douban movie
The whole island is garbage created by humans, decadent, dirty, disease breeding, garbage siege.
The mountain of garbage in Isle of Dogs looks shocking.
Paul Harold, who was responsible for the production and design of the film, said that his set design for The Garbage Island was influenced by the work of photographers Edward Bertinsky and Chris Joden, who have always been concerned about environmental themes;
Behind the puppy are piles of plastic bottles.
So Paul Harold spent a lot of energy trying to restore the real appearance of the garbage island, so as to arouse more people's awareness of marine environmental protection.
This large garbage belt in the Pacific Ocean, whether it is called the "Ghost Eighth Continent" in the Pacific Ocean or the ironic "Garbage Island Republic", has only one purpose - to protect the marine environment and put an end to the "plastic plague" once and for all, which is something that each of us must work for.
Resources:
· Plastic within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is ‘increasing exponentially,’ scientists find, The Washington Post, March 22, 2018；
·《WHY WE MUST CLEAN THE OCEAN GARBAGE PATCHES》，Boyan Slat，Ocean Cleanup Foundation；
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