Can we clean up our trashy oceans? When it comes to debris that floats in from the Japanese Fukushima disaster, it may be vitally important, because some of it may be radioactive. This hasn’t been proven yet, but flotsam from Fukushima–such as empty soda bottles with Japanese labels–are washing up on West Coast beaches.
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How deep is the ocean’s capacity to buffer against climate change? Right now our oceans absorb almost one-third of all our greenhouse gas emissions. During the past three decades, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have largely been matched by corresponding increases in dissolved carbon dioxide in the seawater, but climatologists don’t know if the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate. Warmer water can’t hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean’s carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms.
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There are millions of tons of trash floating in our oceans, much of it plastic (meaning it won’t disappear anytime soon). Scientists are now trying to figure out how to clean it up. The largest "floating island" of plastic trash is in the North Pacific and covers an area twice the size of France. Other trash islands have been discovered in the North and South Atlantic, and scientists suspect that the same thing is taking place in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. When this plastic floats towards a coastline, it affects tourism. It also kills fish that mistake it for food. Worst of all, contaminants in the water cling to the plastic and are then transported across the world’s oceans.read more
The plastic kind – Plastic pollution is a big problem in the ocean right now and we can’t wait until tomorrow to clean it up.
By dragging fine-meshed nets along the ocean’s surface, researchers found that while there is a great deal of it there, the volume seems to have stopped increasing, probably due to new laws that prohibit ships from dumping their trash in the ocean. Plastic, which does not dissolve, is still a major problem, though: They found pieces of it in 60% of the over 6,000 samples of trash they examined.
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