2. One Fish. Two Fish. Red Fish… No Fish.

3. Snow Caps Cones for Everyone.

4. Too Many Lionfish on the Dance Floor.

5. I See Deadzones.

6. No Escape from Plastic Monstas.

7. Where Have All the Coral Reefs Gone and Where are all the Cod?

8. Goodness Gracious, Great Plumes of Oil…and Mercury…and all that other crap we put in the sea.

9. I’m all alone and there’s no zooxanthellae inside me.

10. Fin.

The post 10 Reasons Why the Ocean’s Struggle is Real first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Réunion is practically on the the other side of the Indian basin from where investigators think the missing airplane may have gone down. So how did this chunk of airplane get all the way over there? Short answer: it was pushed by currents, winds and waves. From my physical oceanography perspective, I am going to discuss here what scientists and investigators thought the ocean would do to debris from a possible wreck, what the ocean actually did and what happened to the debris along the way.

What we thought the ocean would do.

Numerical models, also known as electronic oceans inside your computer, are used to predict where currents, winds and waves will push marine debris. In this case, a model run by Charitha Pattiaratchi from the University of Western Australia  was used to estimate the trajectories of crash debris as they were spread out by ocean currents and to figure out where they will end up. And that giant squiggle of red debris trajectories located just east of Madagascar are positioned right on top of Réunion! Of course, this is just a prediction and the timing is a little off since it’s only been 18 months since the crash. This mismatch probably occurred because the model was likely run with historical surface current data and idealized numerical debris, although I couldn’t find any details on the model itself (if anyone knows please send me a link in the comments!). And even though I think Prof. Pattiaratchi oversells his model by saying it “exactly predicted where the debris would go” (if it’s so accurate why hasn’t any debris been found on Australian and Tasmanian beaches?), there are enough realizations to show that debris from the crash would have likely ended up on the tiny isolated bump in the big blue sea called Réunion. So in some ways it’s not surprising that the flaperon washed up there and it’s also likely that more debris will too.

UPDATE: Another model!

And this one shows that the flaperon found on Réunion most likely came from the northern region of the search area. Hydrodynamic experts Maarten van Ormondt and Fedor Baart from Deltares used surface currents from the HYCOM model to track where marine debris might have been carried by currents in the 14 months since the crash. Particles released really far south never made it to Réunion in a year, while those released farther north did! This model more accurately tracks marine debris than the previous model because it incorporates real oceanographic data since March 2014 to estimate realistic surface currents, rather than making a prediction using historical data. That being said, predictive models are still really important! They help dictate where investigators should have searched before the debris were found, as was the case until last week.

What the ocean actually did.

Every news outlet seems to love posting the latest images from earth.nullschool.net to show the currents in the Indian Ocean. Why not? I love that site and the graphics are pretty! But the problem is it only shows a snapshot of the latest 5 days and is not at all indicative of the mean flow that pushed the debris across the Indian Ocean. To do that, we need to look at the average currents since the plane disappeared to get a better grasp on exactly what pushed debris to Réunion.

The most obvious feature in the graphic above are all the arrows pointing westward just south of the equator around 10-15° S. It’s called the South Equatorial Current (we oceanographers are very creative in our naming schemes). Debris from the aircraft got caught up in this flowing water and were likely pushed across the Indian Ocean smack dab onto Réunion.

But it’s a little more unclear in this image how the debris got north from the search area into the South Equatorial Current. The culprit? The West Australian Current that flows northward along Western Australia. You can’t see it too clearly here, because there is a lot of small scale eddies that mess with the averages. But if you look at a even longer term averages, it’s there. The debris probably just took a very squiggley northward path until it reached the South Equatorial Current.

I should also note that the debris was found about 4400 km away from where the plane might have gone down and it’s been about 505 days since the plane disappeared. Making a rough calculation with my TI-85, that means the drift speed of the debris needs to be about 0.1 m/s or ~5 miles a day to get to Réunion from the search area. That’s pretty close to the current speeds in the plot above so it’s totally plausible that this debris is from the crash.

What happened to the debris as it drifted.

Anything that has been in the ocean for more than a year will have some sort of sea life clinging to it, and this piece of wing is no exception. Look at all those gooseneck barnacles! Resident DSN barnacle expert Miriam Goldstein has informed me that this amount of barnacles could easily grow on the flaperon in the 16 months it has probably been out at sea. I’m actually a little surprised more hasn’t grown on it. She also notes that they are from the Genus Lepas, although she can’t identify the species from the photo. The barnacles don’t seem to preferentially growing on one side, which also leads me think that this piece of debris was mostly submerged while drifting.

WHAT NOW?

The search for answers regarding the plane’s disappearance has been a long and difficult one. More debris from the wreck could end up on Réunion or at least near it in the future, if it has not already. Even though we found pieces of the plane, we can’t pinpoint exactly where the plane went down as suggested by some media outlets. But there might be clues in the debris itself to at least indicate what caused the plane to veer so very far off course and disappear. My hope is if investigators can find more debris, they can figure out what happened to MH370 in the first place and finally give the families of those onboard the tragic flight can find some answers and peace.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

The map above was made using ESR’s OSCAR data product, which combines sea satellite data (altimetry, winds, sea surface temperature) and in situ observations (NOAA drifters, moorings) to create global maps of ocean currents every 5 days. http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/OSCAR_L4_OC_third-deg

Here is a good summary of MH370 take-off, disappearance and subsequent searches: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/30/asia/mh370-maps-of-takeoff-disappearance-search/

The post How currents pushed debris from the missing Malaysian Air flight across the Indian Ocean to Réunion first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This is a guest post by Chelsea Rochman. Chelsea is a post-doc at the University of California Davis. This is her fourth 

WARNING: Some content may not be acceptable for a younger audience. (Note from Miriam: It’s ok, Chelsea, nothing in this post is at all out of the ordinary for DSN. It’s salty in these here parts.)

Strange title you say? What can sex possibly have to do with the combination of fish and plastic debris? NO, this is not related to the recent news article regarding a strange object found in the stomach of a fish! Instead, it arises from a recent study performed in our laboratory whereby we were equally perplexed to find something very fishy (no pun intended!) in the testes of a male fish exposed to plastic marine debris.

Sex

Since the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, we have heard eerie stories about alligators with abnormal penises from exposure to DDT, amphibians with eggs in their testes from exposure to atrazine and snails turning hermaphroditic from exposure to tributyltin —all considered hard evidence for endocrine disruption.

Well, this all sounds frightening, depressing and/or a bit like a dark comedy sketch, BUT what is endocrine disruption really?? Well, put simply it is literally any disruption to the endocrine system. The endocrine system is the system in the body of an organism that controls our hormones. As such, it’s critical for functions we all know well including stress before a deadline, the infamous running high, the dreaded PMS, sexual pleasures and arguably most importantly, reproduction (critical to maintaining a population).

What does this have to do with fish??

Well, fish are often used in scientific research assessing the endocrine disrupting hazards of chemicals on wildlife. Fish are a) important for human consumption, b) arguably great ecological indicators of the health of aquatic habitats, c) sensitive to endocrine disruption and d) live in regions that ultimately receive our waste (ever read the phrase, “all drains lead to the ocean”). As such, fish are exposed to many of the chemicals produced and consumed by us and we must understand the hazards of the cocktail of contaminants entering our water bodies. This keeps researchers very busy, as the number of new chemicals synthesized and marketed has increased exponentially over the past fifty years.

OK… and plastic debris?

In the past, endocrine-disruption was not addressed when assessing the hazards associated with synthetic chemicals, and as a consequence chemicals once considered benign have become ubiquitous as environmental contaminants and threaten biodiversity. Similarly, hazards associated with plastic in marine habitats were also likely not addressed when assessing hazards associated with plastic products. Today, plastic debris is ubiquitous in the marine environment and is a contaminant of concern recognized by several countries and international organizations.

As I’ve mentioned before, plastic debris should be considered as a multiple stressor in aquatic habitats as a consequence of the physical toxicity and large mixture of chemical contaminants (i.e. ingredients and environmental contaminants that accumulate on plastic debris) associated with it. Several of these plastic-associated chemicals have been linked to endocrine disrupting effects. Bisphenol-A, now banned on baby products in several states including California and in Europe, can disrupt endocrine-system function. Furthermore, there is evidence that phthalates and nonylphenol, additives to several plastic types, are estrogenic. As such, plastic marine debris is likely associated with a mixture of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. As such, it is critical to assess if the plastic debris that thousands of animals associate with food could initiate any of these eerie hormonal effects described.

The story

Somebody has to do the dirty work, so we dove in and asked if fish experience endocrine disrupting effects when they eat our plastic waste for dinner. Some of you may remember this experiment from a previous blog post. What we did not share then, and will share here, are some troubling results sparked by hypotheses spun from one strange discovery: the very abnormal testes of a male fish fed marine plastic debris.

The image above shows the testes of a normal fish fed a control diet (left) next to the testes of a fish exposed to plastic marine debris (right). The testes of this adult male fish exposed to plastic marine debris has rather abnormal germ cell proliferation. We are unsure whether these abnormal germ cells will lead to intersex or reproductive impairment, but the abnormality of these gonads and the similarity to female germ cells is cause for concern.

Our results show early-warning signs of endocrine disruption in fish exposed to a mixture of plastic and sorbed contaminants, suggesting that plastic marine debris, reportedly ingested by multiple wildlife species, may alter the functioning of the endocrine system in aquatic animals.

Most importantly, we report evidence at the molecular and organ level, for disruption to the endocrine system caused by the “cocktail” of contaminants associated with polyethylene deployed in an urban bay. Of major concern should be the permanent effects that exposure can have during critical early- life stages of organism development, which may impair reproductive success and harm wildlife populations. Still, chronic exposure to environmentally-relevant levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals can have an effect after maturity as reported here. Chronic exposure is typical of marine plastic debris as it accumulates in habitats and is a persistent material that can last for decades.

Current waste-management strategies for plastics remain ineffective, and in parallel global production of plastics continue to increase at an average rate of about 9% per year. Thus the current rate of infiltration of this material into aquatic habitats is likely to increase. Because there have been several reported incidents in wildlife of population declines resulting from the release of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, our results suggest the need for future studies to test hypotheses regarding endocrine disruption in wildlife as a result of exposure to the growing accumulation of plastic debris.

The published study is found here: Rochman et al., 2014, Science of the Total Environment.

The post A story about fish, plastic debris and sex first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Nope. The scariest inhabitant of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is this.

Meet Halofolliculina. It is a single-celled organism – a ciliate – about the size of a sesame seed with teeny tiny devil horns. (They are actually pericytostomial wings, not devil horns, but I won’t tell if you don’t.) My collaborators Hank Carson and Marcus Eriksen found these little buggers living on plastic debris floating way offshore in the western Pacific, which wouldn’t be terrifying in itself since a lot of strange critters live on plastic debris (see our paper for a complete list). But Halofolliculina is a pathogen that causes skeletal eroding band disease in corals, and this piece of debris was headed towards Hawaii.

Unfortunately, Hank and Marcus didn’t save the corals of Hawaii by capturing these Halofolliculina. Skeletal eroding band disease was discovered in Hawaiian corals back in 2010. While It’s not know how this disease got to Hawaii, a lot of plastic trash washes up on Hawaii, and it’s possible that some of that trash had Halofolliculina living on it.

Along with Halofolliculina, there are all kinds of creatures living on plastic debris that wouldn’t normally be able to survive floating in the middle of the ocean. Along with the usual members of the North Pacific rafting community – gooseneck barnacles, bryozoans, rafting crabs – we found brittle stars, sea spiders, and even a shipworm that was probably really unsatisfied living on plastic. Essentially, the trash acts like tiny little islands, with small pieces hosting only a few species, and large pieces (like tangled fishing nets) hosting many more.

The post The scariest inhabitant of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not what you think first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You may have heard me say it once, and I’ll say it again: the oceans are a toilet bowl for our waste. Throughout history, our solution to pollution has oftentimes been “dilution”. As a consequence, chemical pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans as a result of industrialization, waste-management strategies (and/or lack thereof), natural disasters, etc….

Picture a watershed. Treated or not, our waste often finds its way into the oceans via rivers and streams, like arteries leading to the sea. As a consequence, ocean water, sediments and marine life are contaminated with pollutants (e.g., plastic debris, pesticides such as DDT, flame retardants such as PBDEs and metals such as lead and copper). Due to a large diversity of sources, all leading to our connected oceans, it can be VERY difficult to pinpoint the source of pollution when its fate is the aquatic environment.

As such, it becomes my job to try and solve this mystery and basically play detective on the open sea.  What puzzle am I trying to unravel? Well, I’ll warn you, it’s a trashy one…

Throughout my scientific career, I have been trying to understand whether marine plastic debris is a vector for chemical pollutants to accumulate in marine animals and marine food webs. Over the years I have collected several lines of evidence suggesting that it may be.

Scientific Evidence #1: Plastic is made of a large diversity of chemical ingredients, several of which can be hazardous at large concentrations (e.g., the monomers vinyl chloride and styrenes and the flame retardant PBDEs).

Scientific Evidence #2: When plastic becomes marine debris it accumulates persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic substances (e.g., the banned pesticide DDT and industrial chemical PCBs) and toxic metals (e.g., lead and cadmium).

Thus, plastic marine debris is associated with a cocktail of chemicals that can be hazardous. So, the next question is, can these chemicals accumulate in animals upon exposure?

Scientific Evidence #3: When plastic, that is allowed to soak in the ocean, is fed to fish in the laboratory, some chemicals transfer from the plastic to the fish tissue, thus bioaccumulating. We found greater concentrations of PBDEs in fish fed plastic that had been in the ocean versus fish fed no plastic at all or virgin plastic.

Scientific Evidence from other studies: Plastic ingestion occurs in hundreds of species, including 30 species of marine mammals, 41 species of fish, 119 species of seabirds and 6 out of the 7 species of sea turtles and plastic debris recovered from the oceans globally, even from remote regions, is contaminated with chemical pollutants.

ALL leading to the question: Does what we have observed in the lab occur in nature, i.e., does the plastic ingestion observed in wildlife cause the bioaccumulation of chemical pollutants found associated with marine plastic debris? As mentioned earlier, this is where it gets tricky and one must think like a detective, pulling together pieces of a puzzle to ask a greater question.

I was granted an opportunity to sail across the South Atlantic, leaving from Brazil, with 5Gyres aboard their sailboat, the Seadragon. Despite the fact that I get horribly seasick, I jumped at the opportunity and raised enough funds (from the public!) to spend 4 weeks at sea in some of the worst weather I’ve ever experienced in my life with 12 strangers cramped into a small, small space. After fixing our main sail twice, repairing our water maker several times, and almost running out of fuel we made it to Cape Town, South Africa safe and sound. The experience was a mixture of horrible and awesome all at the same time! Would I do it again? Probably.

While at sea, we sampled lanternfish, plastic debris and water. 

We chose lanternfish because they are known to eat plastic debris in open ocean gyres and these fish are good indicators of contamination in the local environment. They make vertical migrations to the surface to feed, which is where plastic debris accumulates and eat low on the foodchain, mostly zooplankton. As such, one might expect that chemical body burdens in these fish would be similar to patterns in the water column where they were sampled. But, if they were exposed to plastic debris and were ingesting this material, we might expect their chemical body burden to be similar to the plastic debris.

Our objective was to determine if fish living in areas with large accumulations of plastic had larger accumulations of plastic-related chemicals. Thus, we analyzed all samples for a mixture of contaminants that are known to be associated with plastic either as an ingredient and/or that accumulate from the water column (BPA, alkylphenols, PBDEs and PCBs). Each analysis revealed the contamination pattern in each sample. These patterns each provide a piece of the puzzle that could be put together to understand if we could detect the presence of chemicals from plastic in wild-caught fish.

Because this study was conducted in the open ocean, we observed a lot of variability. There was plastic and chemicals contamination in every sample, and concentrations and amounts were variable along our cruise track. Still, one pattern stood out above all else…

The flame-retardants PBDEs are added to plastic products to, as you might have guessed, keep them from going up in flames. These compounds are composed of 2 aromatic rings with differing numbers of bromines. The higher brominated compounds are often used in plastics today and can be found on some plastic products in large concentrations. We found that most of the plastic debris we sampled had a large amount of these higher brominated congeners relative to the lower brominated PBDEs. In water samples, we found an opposite pattern, that 100% of the PBDEs in water samples were these lower brominated congeners. As such, most of the fish we sampled had congener patterns similar to those in the water column. However, some fish had relatively large amounts of higher brominated PBDEs in their tissues and these fish happened to be caught in areas with relatively larger amounts of plastic debris. We found that the amount of higher brominated PBDEs in fish tissue was positively correlated with the amount of plastic sampled in the area. So, our data suggests that YES, chemicals from plastic can accumulate in fish and that higher brominated flame-retardants may be indicative of plastic ingestion in wildlife.

Adding strength to our evidence, others researchers in Japan and at CalEPA have come to the same conclusions finding similar patterns with higher brominated PBDEs and plastic debris in wild-caught fish and seabirds in the North Pacific.

So while it can be difficult to determine the sources of contaminants in nature, good detective work can lead to a greater weight of evidence to better understand sources of chemical pollutants, even in the vast open ocean. And in this case, it seems that the current state of the evidence suggests that marine plastic debris can be a vector for chemical pollutants to accumulate in marine animals and thus potentially marine food webs. So now I’m on to the next piece of the puzzle: how might this affect humans, who sit at the top of some marine foodchains, when our diet includes seafood?

The post Guest post: Playing Detective in the Great Blue Sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The long and windy path to a Ph.D. is lined with blood, sweat and tears. Like a roller coaster, it can be filled with joy, anxiety, fear and even nausea. This story is regarding one chapter of my dissertation, one that filled me with all these emotions and lead me to the conclusion that even in science, sh%* happens. But in this story, what we could not control lead us to better scientific conclusions with greater environmental realism. Due to what may seem like an experimental shortcoming, we were able to answer an important “so what?” question related to plastic marine debris.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the many images of marine mammals, birds and turtles entangled in plastic debris or washed up with large plastic items in their digestive tract. What we don’t see, but may question, is how the chemical pollutants associated with plastic debris interact with marine life and potentially our seafood.

When plastic becomes marine debris it accumulates several chemical pollutants swirling in seawater such as pesticides (e.g. DDT), industrial chemicals (e.g. PCBs) and metals (e.g. lead) adding to the several potentially hazardous ingredients (e.g. PBDEs and bisphenol A) already in the plastic material. Thus plastic debris presents a “cocktail” of chemical contaminants to marine animals when mistaken as a meal.

As such, it has been hypothesized that plastic debris acts as a transporter of these chemicals, several of which can be toxic at certain doses, to animals upon ingestion. While we have strong evidence that hundreds of species eat plastic debris, and several case studies showing that plastic ingestion can physically harm an animal, we have little evidence of the fate of chemicals associated with plastic debris when ingested by marine life.

In our laboratory, the Aquatic Health Program at UC Davis, we designed an experiment to determine if plastic ingestion is indeed a mechanism for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to accumulate in marine life. Because we wanted to understand how marine plastic debris might interact with both ecology and human health, we chose to conduct our study using fish, suggested as a good indicator of ecosystem health and a common seafood item.

To do this, we devised a rigorous controlled experiment, using clean laboratory-reared Japanese medaka and a contaminant-free diet made in the laboratory. This way we could be sure any contamination in our fish was a product of plastic ingestion. We also bound the plastic to the diet in our two plastic treatments so we could be sure these fish were eating the plastic. OR SO WE THOUGHT…

Similar to nature, and even with our best efforts, sometimes controlled laboratory experiments are not as controlled as planned… Instead, all 3 diets (negative control, virgin polyethylene and polyethylene marine debris) turned out to be contaminated with POPs (as cod liver oil is an ingredient in our formulated diet). Moreover, the plastic particles completely dispersed from the diet when sprinkled into the fish tanks at each feeding.

Immediately, we began to panic. We feared our fish would not eat the plastic at all and if they did that it would be impossible to decipher contamination from plastic versus contamination from their diet. After several days of freaking out, worrying all our work had gone to waste, what seemed to be a catastrophe became a blessing in disguise. HALLELUJAH!!

DUMB LUCK #1: The oceans are a toilet bowl for chemical contaminants, including POPs. As such, these chemicals are ubiquitous in marine foodwebs in the absence of plastic debris. While it is well-known that these chemicals contaminate plastic debris, and there is some evidence that these chemicals transfer to animals (e.g. lugworms) upon ingestion, it is not clear if the source of POPs from plastic to marine animals matters in an already contaminated system. What I mean is: in the presence of plastic debris, is an organism at risk of accumulating a higher dose of POPs? As a consequence of the contamination in the cod liver oil, we were able to examine this question because our experiment included contamination in the foodchain (i.e. the diet) of all treatments with the addition of more POPs on the polytethylene in the marine-plastic treatment.

DUMB LUCK #2: The plastic did not bind to the diet and instead, upon feeding the fish, the plastic dispersed and floated independently in the water as it does in the real world. Fish were not force-fed plastic, but instead were exposed to it and had to “choose” to eat it. In this way, we were able to consider the dose of plastic to the fish in amount of plastic per volume of water. As such, the exposure concentration of plastic floating in our tanks was less than some of the largest concentrations found in the “garbage patches” of the subtropical gyres, and thus environmentally relevant. And to our surprise, the fish ate plastic and continued to do so for the entire 2 months!!

Thus, with a lot of hard work and good attitudes regarding laboratory mishaps, our experiment became ecologically relevant. Initially, we were only able to ask the mechanistic question: “do contaminants on plastic transfer to fish upon ingestion?”. Instead, we could address the more relevant question, “is plastic, at real-world concentrations, an important vector of contaminants to the foodweb, despite widespread and global contamination of these chemicals in seawater, sediment and the marine food chain?”.

After a 2-month exposure to plastic, the concentrations of POPs in the fish demonstrated that despite contamination in the diet, concentrations of POPs were greater in fish fed plastic with sorbed chemical pollutants. For some chemicals, this significantly greater concentration in fish suggests that plastic debris can be an important vector of POPs into marine life and thus potentially into the seafood we put on our own plates.

For more information, check out the published study, and feel free to ask questions in the comment section.

The post Guest post: The invisible consequences of mistaking plastic for dinner first appeared on Deep Sea News.

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

– “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, Wallace Stevens

————-

I would like to move beyond mythbusting.

I give a lot of public talks about my research on plastic trash in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and after every talk, someone comes up to me and says “Wow! I really thought there was an island!” (Well, in one memorable instance, a woman came up to me and said, “YOU MEAN IT WAS ALL LIES???”) I smile and say, yes, it’s a common misconception, and no, I really don’t know where it came from originally, but it probably has to do with the art chosen to illustrate news stories about open ocean plastic pollution, like my nemesis Canoe Guy.

So when I heard there was not one, but two upcoming graphic novels about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and that both depicted the patch as a giant floating island, I confess that I was a bit overcome with despair. I’ve spent so much time and communication energy trying to combat the misconception of the floating trash island. Why did these artists choose to portray it like that? So I asked them.

I’m Not a Plastic Bag, by Rachel Hope Allison, wordlessly tells the story of a lonely garbage-island-creature through lush art. It’s a gorgeous book. I was struck by how poignantly the illustrations communicated the beauty and desolation of the open sea – the endless horizons, the changing clouds, the single squid outlined against infinite blue. And the poor garbage island! I felt so bad for it!

Allison became interested in the garbage patch when an oceanographer ex-boyfriend sent her an article. In a phone interview a few weeks ago, she told me she was shocked that something this large could exist “in this modern age where you assume that everything is tracked and we’re aware of it.” She wanted to tell the story of the Garbage Patch, but without being “preachy and didactic,” so she decided tell the story from the perspective of the garbage island itself – “the perspective of something that has inherited a problem that it hasn’t created, but still has to live with it.”

I’m Not a Plastic Bag is specifically focused around environmental activism, with an educational supplement in the back, done in collaboration with Nick Mallos at the Ocean Conservancy, that explains that “the Garbage Patch does not appear as a giant floating landfill…but rather a trash stew…While there are areas of dense debris, much more common are seemingly barren swatches of ocean full of broken down debris…” The supplement is filled with photos of beach cleanups and entangled wildlife, but there are no photos of what the North Pacific Gyre actually looks like – which is to say, like regular ocean with tiny, nearly impossible-to-see bit of plastic.

When I asked Allison about why she chose to portray a solid trash island, she laughed and said “I have pangs of guilt sometimes – is this [the island] problematic? I hope not!” She went on to explain:

I was in the story trying to figure out a way to visually communicate & make it [the garbage patch] a character, something that [the reader] could communicate with and be inspired by science. I hope that the fact that it’s so whimsical communicates that it’s not real, just inspired by the real thing. I think it’s similar to the way we draw the sun, with triangle rays. It’s a visual trope that talks about something real. At the time when I did this story it was very much focused on emotional stuff…I hope the fact that’s it speaks to both emotional ways and scientific ways give it a more balanced view. You’re totally right that myths and conceptions can be tricky and hard to balance – whether more people know about it and know about it in the correct way, and if that matters down the road.

Environmental concerns also drew Joe Harris, the author of Great Pacific, to the garbage island. Great Pacific won’t be out until November of this year, but here’s a synopsis via io9:

Set on an environmental disaster of floating trash and plastic trapped by Pacific Ocean currents, the series follows CHAS WORTHINGTON-thrill-seeking heir to one of America’s largest oil fortunes-who throws his plush life of wealth, power and pleasure aside when he decides to settle the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch and develop his own fledgling, independent nation upon it.

Chas will have to survive in the junk and waste-strewn dead zone, battling the elements, deadly marine life and animals mutated by the pollution, along with other threats which might challenge him for resources, including hostile island natives and even the United States Navy. He will build his new country, forge treaties with other ones and fund development and transformation of his own plastic island which recent estimates put at about twice the size of his home state of Texas.

Harris was kind enough to sit down with me in July at San Diego Comic-Con (even though he saw my cranky muttering about the “garbage island” on Twitter) and talk to me about Great Pacific. While I promised him I wouldn’t give away any of the plot points, I can tell you that it looks super fun – who doesn’t like a giant octopus? Check out this preview video for a sense of the art.

I asked Harris to explain why he chose to set his comic on the mythical trash island. “I find it to be fascinatingly horrific on a large scale, and I’m floored by how many people have not heard of it,” Harris said. “I just found it fascinating that this has been going on for decades, getting worse and worse.” Harris saw his science fiction series as a “license to be fantastic…and to shine perhaps a hotter spotlight on this than might be warranted. When I get to the underpinnings of this, I’m no less awed in the most disgusting way.”

Harris hopes that people would be just as horrified by the reality of the Garbage Patch as they are by the filthy plastic island portrayed in his series. He sees the garbage island in his comic series as equivalent to the mutating radiation of comic books of years past – a way to express fear about the way the world is headed. “It would seem to me that enough people aren’t paying attention to issues like this, so if we could make them pay attention to the term ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch,’ I would hope there would be value in that that would bleed over into reality.”

If the upside to creating a garbage island is increased public awareness, what’s the downside? Potentially, it’s the creation of persistant misconceptions. For example, a recent study described in Discover’s 80 Beats blog (via Ed Yong) found that people are more likely to believe a statement is true when it is accompanied by a picture. So in this case, seeing the pictures of the island of garbage make people more likely to believe it is real, because it feels true.  To make matters more complicated, another study found that correcting people’s misconceptions with factual information actually does very little to reduce their belief in “false or unsupported claims.” Once these misconceptions take root in people’s minds, they’re almost impossible to counter, no matter how much data to the contrary is out there, or how many lectures people hear from a dorky scientist lady in an Octo-Pi tshirt.

Because of all this, I picked up Andrew Blackwell’s “travel guide to the eco-apocalypse,” Visit Sunny Chernobyl, with a certain feeling of dread. That he had titled his chapter “The Eighth Continent: Searching for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” did not lift my spirits. Blackwell visited the patch in 2010 with the nonprofit group Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to cleaning up the plastic. [Full disclosure: Project Kaisei partially funded the 2009 Scripps plastics cruise for which I was chief scientist.]

But then I read it, and it was wonderful. Blackwell has written the single best explanation of the harm done by garbage patch myths that I have ever seen. From the book:

[The search for a high concentration of floating trash] was the paradoxical symbiosis that can afflict any activist. You come to depend on the problem you’re fighting. That we were so focused on finding the Garbage Patch in a concrete and spectacular form was tragic—particularly because it isn’t a visually spectacular problem. As we would discover once we reached the Gyre, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch doesn’t actually look like much—unless you’re paying attention. The plastic confetti are invisible unless you scrutinize the surface of the water. And the millions of plastic bottles and laundry hampers and snarls of old fishing tackle are not clumped into a single mass. Yet the Garbage Patch is indeed a problem of vast scale and implications.

This conflict between the reality of the problem and its non-visual nature is at the root of the myth of the plastic island. We hunger for a compelling image to help us understand the issue. But depending too much on spectacular imagery can actually limit our understanding. We create islands where none exist, and then waste our time searching for them. We become Ahabs without a whale.

The mythical Garbage Island is dramatic and gloomily romantic. I get that. I love art and comics and science fiction, and I would hate to see them have to confirm to some humorless idea of factual correctness. But I remain unconvinced that reaching for people’s emotions with the siren song (a particularly apt metaphor in this case) of the trash island is worth promoting persistant misconceptions. Does portraying the North Pacific Gyre as an island of trash get to a a deeper artistic and emotional truth?  Or does it just send more well-meaning people hunting for a non-existent garbage-Moby-Dick?

I’m Not a Plastic Bag, by Rachel Hope Allison. Published by Archaia Entertainment, April 2012, in partnership with JeffCorwinConnect. Link.

Great Pacific, story by Joe Harris and art by Martin Morazzo. Image Comics, upcoming November 2012. Link.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl, by Andrew Blackwell. Rodale Books, May 2012. Link.

The post Three Ways of Looking at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Objects that float mostly above the surface of the water, like chunks of styrofoam,  are more affected by the speed of the wind than the speed of the water, so they scud quickly across the ocean surface. This means they have “high windage,” and are shown by the red dots in the model. Objects that float half-in, half-out of the water, like fishing buoys and containers, have medium windage and move somewhat faster than the water (green dots). Objects that don’t float above the surface of the water, like fishing nets and plastic crates, have low windage and move the same speed the water (purple dots).

This explains why debris objects appear to be showing up earlier than scientists originally expected – high windage objects such as the dock found in Oregon and the soccer ball found in Alaska moved relatively quickly across the ocean.

Many thanks to Nick for answering my questions over Twitter, and for Nikolai & Jan for making their model publicly available. 

The post How wind-blown Japanese tsunami debris may move across the Pacific first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You might have seen the headlines last week: Big rise in North Pacific plastic waste, Plastic in ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ increases 100-fold, Ocean Trash is a Lifesaver for Insects, and so forth. These were based on a paper that I wrote with two co-authors, which came out in Biology Letters last week. Because the paper has gotten so much media attention already – including my very first Ed Yong original! – I’m not going to blog about the paper directly. Instead, I’m going to give you a glimpse behind the scenes. Since scientists-vs-media is a perennially hot topic on science blogland, I’ll explain how we prepared for and managed the media in order to achieve coverage with which we were mostly quite happy.

Having worked on North Pacific oceanic marine debris for a number of years, I knew this was going to be a hot topic. We were taken aback by the intensity of the media and public interest in our 2009 cruise to study plastic in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and interest has remained steady over the past few years. So once the paper was in press, about 2-3 weeks before online publication,  I gave a copy of the paper to Scripps public information officer Mario Aguilera. I’ve worked with Mario for several years now – he even came to sea with us! (that’s him on the BBC website deploying the manta net with me) – and I knew he was very familiar with the work. Mario completed the press release about a week before the paper came out, which gave me, my co-authors, and my advisor plenty of time to review it. Preparing for press coverage carefully ahead of time also gave us time to ask Anthony Smith for permission to use his wonderful sea skater photo, which you can see on the Scripps website. The paper was embargoed until Wednesday, May 9th, but media had access to it for a week beforehand. I started getting calls and emails on the Monday before it was released, which built to quite a number of inquiries by Wednesday.

My personal media policy is this: my work was paid for by United States taxpayers, California taxpayers, and private donors, and so I’ll talk to anyone who asks me polite and coherent questions, if my schedule allows. This means that I’ve done 28 interviews since last Monday – and they’re still trickling in. All these interviews probably did cost me a couple days of work – but I spent 2.5 years and a lot of money on the science on this paper! A couple of days talking to the media to tell the public what they paid for is more than fair recompense.

Our preparations and Mario’s hard work in wrangling lots of scheduling made all 28 interviews run reasonably smoothly. Also, my long-time participation in science outreach was a plus – for example, I had used Twitter to ask BBC reporter Jonathan Amos to stop by my poster at the Ocean Sciences Meeting this past February, so he was already familiar with the research before even writing the story. Doing lots of science outreach also meant that I was practiced in explaining this work to a general audience, so I wasn’t doing it for the first time when talking to a journalist. One surprising barrier was my lack of a land line – I don’t have one in my office or home. (I use a Google Voice number for my “office phone.”) I suspect this type of setup is increasingly common among younger scientists (and people in general), so I encourage the journalists out there to get familiar with Skype as a workaround. I did a couple video interviews over Skype and it worked well, though it’s probably not for novice communicators, since talking alone in your office to your laptop camera is quite challenging.

While I was pretty pleased with accuracy of the media coverage as a whole, I did run into some problems that were largely my fault. I should have realized that I needed to more carefully explain the difference between size (“Size of Texas!” which is not accurate) and concentration (100-fold increase in the number & mass of plastic PER unit seawater, which is accurate). When talking about fish eating plastic (a separate study done by Scripps students last year), I should have been more careful to mention that these fish swim up to the surface every night, and therefore may be eating plastic there, not in the depths of the ocean. That’s the stereotypical scientist trip-up – Diel Vertical Migration is an ocean phenomenon engrained in my SOUL, but it is definitely not common knowledge. Problems from the media side of things primarily stemmed from careless readings of the press release – for example, we found that sea skater EGGS were increasing, but couldn’t show statistically that sea skater ADULTS were increasing, which some reporters misunderstood.

I’m extremely grateful to Biology Letters for making our paper open access. I chose to publish in Biology Letters in part because everything is open access a year after publication, but I didn’t have the funds to make the paper open access right away. (See that pretty color figure? That’s where my money went.) I’m thrilled that Biology Letters editors saw the public interest in this topic and decided to make the paper freely available to all. I’ve made the new data from the paper open access as well – anyone can download it and take an in-depth look at Pacific plastic pollution themselves. (Thanks to the NSF-funded California Current Long Term Ecological Research site for hosting it.)

And of course, it was all worth it – because we were featured in the Onion! (“Better than Science or Nature,” according to my Twitter friends…)

I hope that this is helpful to other scientists who may be facing similar media situations. Please feel free to ask questions or share your own experiences in the comments.

[cross-posted at the SEAPLEX blog]

The post Pacific plastic, sea skaters, and the media: behind the scenes of my recent paper first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami is headed towards Hawaii and the North American west coast. For those concerned, several new sources of information are now available on the web:

Explainers: NOAA has a new video and podcast explaining how the debris is moving across the ocean, and what you can do to help. (Click through – it can’t embed). Ocean Conservancy also has a really nice explainer webpage. Though this isn’t new, the NOAA Marine Debris program also has a tsunami FAQ page.

NOAA visualization of debris track: Here is a visualization of the possible debris track from the NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory. (Again, you must click through, sorry.) It is based off 5 years of historical weather patterns, and is an approximation of a path the debris may take. For another look at possible debris paths, see my post on how scientists tracked tsunami debris to 700 miles off Midway Island.

Webinar: Japanese Tsunami Marine Debris: Anticipating and Mitigating Its Impacts on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. This webinar took place last Monday, and a video is now available for those who couldn’t catch it live. You can also see my tweets at @seaplexscience. If you are interested in more events of this type, sign up for the MarineDebris.Info listserv.

National Geographic story on tourists paying to go on an expedition to hunt for the debris field with the NGOs Algalita Marine Research Foundation and 5 Gyres.

Transpacific Tsunami Debris Presentation by Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham. Dr. Ebbesmeyer is the physical oceanographer famed for tracking rubber duckies and Nike sneakers across the world’s oceans, and Jim Ingraham is a retired NOAA oceanographer who developed the Ocean Surface CURrent Simulator (OSCURS) model. (The OSCURS model is the basis for the debris path models linked to above.) The presentation was given at Peninsula College (Port Angeles, WA) on December, 13th 2011 and sponsored by Peninsula College, Coastal Watershed Institute and the Olympic Peninsula Chapter of Surfrider Foundation.

The post Japanese tsunami debris link roundup first appeared on Deep Sea News.