Thanks to Eleanor P. for this article!
By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News
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Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.
But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confetti like pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.
"Marine debris is the new man-made epidemic. It's that serious," said Andrea Neal, principal investigator on the Kaisei, a 151-foot research ship on the trip.
Neal, a Santa Barbara researcher who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and biochemistry, said crews on the three-week voyage discovered tiny jellyfish eating bits of the plastic debris. The jellyfish are, in turn, eaten by fish like salmon or tuna, which people eat.
Because the plastic pieces contain toxic chemicals — and are believed to be able to absorb now-banned chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, which can persist in the environment for decades — state toxicologists have taken hundreds of the objects, along with more than 300 fish, to an environmental chemistry lab in Berkeley to see if any chemicals are moving up the food chain.
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Scientists believe the trash washes down storm drains and rivers from places such as the Bay Area or Japan, eventually drifting into several large ocean vortices where currents swirl together.
Two ships embarked a month ago to study the site. The New Horizon, a 170-foot vessel, was sent by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. The Kaisei — whose name means "ocean planet" in Japanese — left from Richmond. It was sent by Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito nonprofit that privately raised $500,000 for the voyage.
Both ships met at sea, collected water samples and took thousands of readings and photographs. Their goal: to study the patch's size, how the plastic affects wildlife and whether it may be possible to one day clean up some of it.
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The garbage patch is emerging as a major international environmental concern. Not only do its plastics pose a potential chemical threat, but birds, sea turtles and other marine life die when they eat or become entangled in floating plastic. Invasive species such as crabs, barnacles and other marine life also can attach themselves to it and float across the globe.
In the central Pacific, there are up to six pounds of marine litter for every pound of plankton, according to a 2006 report from the United Nations Environment Programme. And roughly 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans there, the report found.
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