I too grew up in the country and learned a great deal about nature just by being quiet and observing....connecting the dots as the article above explains, likening it to a morning newspaper.
The two posted articles below I know that Stradee will be interested in, having to do with agriculture. Vertical farming in urgan areas, what a concept.
August 24, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
A Farm on Every Floor
By DICKSON D. DESPOMMIER
IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.
The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.
What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.
Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world’s hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans.
Imagine a farm right in the middle of a major city. Food production would take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. Both methods are soil-free. Hydroponics allows us to grow plants in a water-and-nutrient solution, while aeroponics grows them in a nutrient-laden mist. These methods use far less water than conventional cultivation techniques, in some cases as much as 90 percent less.
Now apply the vertical farm concept to countries that are water-challenged " the Middle East readily comes to mind " and suddenly things look less hopeless. For this reason the world’s very first vertical farm may be established there, although the idea has garnered considerable interest from architects and governments all over the world.
Vertical farms are now feasible, in large part because of a robust global greenhouse initiative that has enjoyed considerable commercial success over the last 10 years. (Disclosure: I’ve started a business to build vertical farms.) There is a rising consumer demand for locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as intense urban-farming activity in cities throughout the United States. Vertical farms would not only revolutionize and improve urban life but also revitalize land that was damaged by traditional farming. For every indoor acre farmed, some 10 to 20 outdoor acres of farmland could be allowed to return to their original ecological state (mostly hardwood forest). Abandoned farms do this free of charge, with no human help required.
A vertical farm would behave like a functional ecosystem, in which waste was recycled and the water used in hydroponics and aeroponics was recaptured by dehumidification and used over and over again. The technologies needed to create a vertical farm are currently being used in controlled-environment agriculture facilities but have not been integrated into a seamless source of food production in urban high-rise buildings.
Such buildings, by the way, are not the only structures that could house vertical farms. Farms of various dimensions and crop yields could be built into a variety of urban settings " from schools, restaurants and hospitals to the upper floors of apartment complexes. By supplying a continuous quantity of fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers, these farms would help combat health problems, like Type II diabetes and obesity, that arise in part from the lack of quality produce in our diet.
The list of benefits is long. Vertical farms would produce crops year-round that contain no agro-chemicals. Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors. The farms would greatly reduce fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, since they would eliminate the need for heavy farm machinery and trucks that deliver food from farm to fork. (Wouldn’t it be great if everything on your plate came from around the corner, rather than from hundreds to thousands of miles away?)
Vertical farming could finally put an end to agricultural runoff, a major source of water pollution. Crops would never again be destroyed by floods or droughts. New employment opportunities for vertical farm managers and workers would abound, and abandoned city properties would become productive once again.
Vertical farms would also make cities more pleasant places to live. The structures themselves would be things of beauty and grace. In order to allow plants to capture passive sunlight, walls and ceilings would be completely transparent. So from a distance, it would look as if there were gardens suspended in space.
City dwellers would also be able to breathe easier " quite literally. Vertical farms would bring a great concentration of plants into cities. These plants would absorb carbon dioxide produced by automobile emissions and give off oxygen in return. So imagine you wanted to build the first vertical farm and put it in New York City. What would it take? We have the technology " now we need money, political will and, of course, proof that this concept can work. That’s why a prototype would be a good place to start. I estimate that constructing a five-story farm, taking up one-eighth of a square city block, would cost $20 million to $30 million. Part of the financing should come from the city government, as a vertical farm would go a long way toward achieving Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of a green New York City by 2030. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already expressed interest in having a vertical farm in the city. City officials should be interested. If a farm is located where the public can easily visit it, the iconic building could generate significant tourist dollars, on top of revenue from the sales of its produce.
But most of the financing should come from private sources, including groups controlling venture-capital funds. The real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming. Imagine a farm in which crop production is not limited by seasons or adverse weather events. Sales could be made in advance because crop-production levels could be guaranteed, thanks to the predictable nature of indoor agriculture. An actual indoor farm developed at Cornell University growing hydroponic lettuce was able to produce as many as 68 heads per square foot per year. At a retail price in New York of up to $2.50 a head for hydroponic lettuce, you can easily do the math and project profitability for other similar crops.
When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Perhaps people just need to see proof that farms can grow several stories high. As soon as the first city takes that leap of faith, the world’s first vertical farm could be less than a year away from coming to the aid of a hungry, thirsty world. Not a moment too soon.
Dickson D. Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, is writing a book about vertical farms.
And fishing and climate change.
August 24, 2009
Editorial
A Real Fish Story
Here is an unusual fish story. And a positive one.
On Thursday, Gary Locke, the secretary of commerce, approved a plan that would prohibit commercial fishing in a huge swath of American waters in the Arctic that have never been actively fished and that nobody is much interested in fishing now.
That sounds odd, but it’s a smart move based on the assumption that the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change will someday make the area more accessible and commercially more attractive.
This was also the first time the United States shut down a fishery because of climate change rather than overfishing. Mr. Locke’s objective is to buy time to get a fix on the area’s resources and develop a sustainable fishing plan that would assure lasting protection for a fragile and poorly understood ecosystem.
The plan was developed jointly by environmentalists and the Marine Conservation Alliance, a consortium of Alaskan harvesters and processors. Conservationists and industry do not, as a rule, agree on how quickly fish should be taken from the sea. Here they agreed not to take any at all " until it seems safe to do so.
The prohibition covers nearly 200,000 square miles north of the Bering Strait. These waters are believed to be rich in cod and snow crab, among other species. In time, they could well provide a new home for cold-water species like pollock and salmon that are already moving north as global warming increases water temperatures in their normal habitats.
The hope in Alaska and Washington is that the plan will send a signal to other Arctic nations " including Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark " that are also eyeing the potentially huge resources beneath the thawing Arctic icepack. Fish migrate long distances, and care little for international borders. International cooperation will ultimately be required to protect them.
Closing American waters tells the world that the United States is putting its own house in order until science determines that fishing can be allowed in a responsible and sustainable manner.
@sumac,
I recall Dan mentioning a trip with a friend who didn't notice forest Fall colors. People are so engulfed with everyday probs, some miss the wonders nature offers each day.
Such good articles, sue. I'm interested in all the articles you post, thanks.
A good concept, and one that could easily begin in innercity neighborhoods - training and job opportunities plus, and healthy food!
Is anyone else having problems with care2? I click the thread link, the page appears, but when i click the rainforest box, instead of registering the click, a page appears and says IE cannot display the website. ????
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@Stradee,
Gosh, Stradee - what a memory...........
Yeah, I too have had that page - I think maybe it's the time of day and the number of people accessing. Or, could be the weather - I wait and later it does what it is supposed to do. Might help also to clean up the junk that piles up in your comy. A good clean and a bit of tidy does wonders.
@danon5,
aktbird57 and the WildClickers have supported 2,942,770.4 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 226,006.2 square feet.
American Prairie habitat supported: 69,234.9 square feet.
Rainforest habitat supported: 2,647,529.3 square feet.
@danon5,
Thanks Dan!
Did a bit of tidy, and voila!
Hi Beth. Have you recovered from traveling/visits? Hope all went well.
No problems here, except the periodic one where the page claims that I have already clicked today. Solve that by clicking your link here, Stradee. Some more good articles of interest.
August 25, 2009
Diving Deep for a Living Fossil
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.
Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.
The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.
They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey " an organism a bit larger than a poker chip " represents one of the world’s oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.
Has the long pursuit frustrated him? “No,” Dr. Rona replied as he displayed traces of the animal in sedimentary rocks some 50 million years old. “It’s science. It’s detective work. It’s about racking up one clue after another.”
Still, in an interview at Rutgers, Dr. Rona said he looked forward to eventually capturing one of the creatures alive. “I think it’s likely,” he said, “if we can do the dives.” Dr. Rona, an authority on the deep sea, likes nothing better than to cram himself into a tiny submersible and fall into the abyss.
It takes more than two hours to descend to the creature’s abode, which lies more than two miles down. The environmental stability of that world " including its crushing pressures and icy darkness " means that some of its most famous inhabitants have survived for eons as evolutionary throwbacks, their bodies undergoing little change. For instance, sea lilies, marine animals with feathery arms, date back more than 400 million years.
Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.
Dr. Rona’s inability to catch the creature itself means that even though scientists have given it the fossil’s name, they still vigorously debate what it is. The main question is whether the hexagonal patterns are burrows or body parts, vacant residences or animal remains.
Other deep sea sleuths who share Dr. Rona’s fascination with P. nodosum can be found at Yale and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, as well as institutions in France, Canada and the United Kingdom.
“He’s got the drive of curiosity,” said Adolf Seilacher, a paleontologist at Yale and co-author of the new paper who first contacted Dr. Rona three decades ago to discuss the creature. “Real scientists, naturalists, are extremely curious.”
Dr. Seilacher added that P. nodosum was a most unusual animal, especially because the many holes at the surface of its abode link up below in a labyrinth of subsurface tunnels.
“It’s not just any fossil but a demonstration of a very complex way of life,” he said in an interview. “It’s a building plan, a behavior that makes this animal erect this gallery system. It’s a lifestyle that is very, very old.”
Dr. Seilacher said the earliest forms of Paleodictyon dated to the explosion of complex life in the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago. The animals began existence in shallow waters, he added, and gradually expanded into the dark habitats of the deep sea.
Dr. Rona became fascinated by the abyss in a roundabout way. His first love was rocks and mountains. In 1957, he received a master’s degree in geology from Yale and went to work for Standard Oil, exploring the American Southwest for promising sites.
But in 1958, while visiting his family in Manhattan over the Christmas holidays, he came upon groups of oceanographers and research ships, their vessels moored to West Side piers. The famous scientists, in New York for a meeting, spoke of a vast new world.
By the early 1970s, armed with a doctorate in marine geology and geophysics from Yale, Dr. Rona was exploring the deep Atlantic for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. He used dredges, cameras and echo sounders that mapped the seabed.
In 1976, he stumbled on the living fossil.
Dr. Rona and his colleagues were towing a giant camera sled, its strobe lights firing every few seconds, lighting up the seabed and recording the images on big reels of 35-millimeter film. Weeks later, back in his Florida office, Dr. Rona examined the freshly developed film.
His head began to spin.
What were all the holes? And what made the patterns?
At first, Dr. Rona assumed the film developers were pulling a prank. Then, as a magnifying glass drove home the reality of the holes, he got paranoid and weighed the possibility that the patterns represented the footprints of alien creatures from outer space that were colonizing the remote seabed. Fortunately, he let that idea drop, and began interviewing the best marine biologists he could find, first in Florida, then in Washington at the Smithsonian Institution. He struck out. No one had a clue.
In 1978, Dr. Rona and a colleague, George F. Merrill, published a paper that ruled out many possibilities and called the mystery animals “invertebrates of uncertain identity.”
The breakthrough came soon thereafter. Dr. Seilacher, then at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, wrote Dr. Rona to say the organism bore “perfect identity” with the fossil P. nodosum. He called the link “beyond any doubt.”
In his letter, Dr. Seilacher suggested that the two scientists collaborate to study the creature. “I would love to participate in this adventure,” he wrote.
Nothing happened. The Atlantic site was too remote, too costly to scrutinize.
In 1985, all that changed. Nearby, Dr. Rona and his colleagues discovered a riot of hot springs and bizarre life, including millions of shrimp. Suddenly, governments around the globe found the wherewithal to send oceanographers racing to the middle of the North Atlantic to explore the teeming springs.
Dr. Rona’s creatures lay less than a mile way. Piggybacking on high-priority missions, he managed to visit the muddy site repeatedly, making submersible dives in 1990, 1991, 1993, 2001 and 2003. On the latter dive, he and Dr. Seilacher went down together.
Their collaboration made them improbable movie stars. In 2003, IMAX released “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” featuring their hunt for the living fossil.
Repeatedly, Dr. Rona tried to capture living specimens. He would have a hollow plastic tube lowered over a hexagonal spot and scoop up a thick core of seabed mud. But detailed inspections of the muck never revealed anything of significance " no body parts, no biological fibers, no DNA.
The 2003 dive of Dr. Rona and Dr. Seilacher did, however, produce hard evidence that finally linked the animal to P. nodosum. The robot arm of the submersible Alvin directed a hose that squirted water at a hexagonal array of holes, slowly removing layers of mud. The delicate operation quickly revealed a hexagonal array of subsurface tunnels identical to those of the fossil.
“For me,” Dr. Rona recalled, “it was a eureka moment.”
In May, the team’s new paper appeared in the online version of Deep-Sea Research, Part II, an oceanographic journal published twice monthly. The printed article is due out in September.
The paper " more than a dozen pages filled with dense type, figures and photographs " reviews the evidence of more than three decades and concludes that the hexagonal forms “are identical” with P. nodosum, backing the conclusion Dr. Seilacher reached long ago.
The paper seeks no consensus on the question of whether the holes and subsurface networks represent burrows or body parts. Dr. Seilacher, who backs the burrow idea, sees the tunnels as a kind of farm where an unknown type of worm or other organism raises micro-organisms to eat.
Dr. Rona sees the holes as body parts, perhaps from a type of compressed sponge. The lack of biological clues, he said in the interview, may arise because microbial predators eat the remains after the creatures die.
The reason the team had captured no living specimens, he added, may lie in the great age and number of empty abodes, or bodies. Dr. Rona said the area’s light sedimentation meant fresh-looking holes “can persist on the seafloor for hundreds of years.”
Neither man will give in to the other on the subject of what the holes represent " despite their collaboration of more than three decades.
“Disagreement is necessary in science,” Dr. Seilacher said. “It’s good because it forces you to find new arguments and more arguments.”
Dr. Rona seems eager to find new evidence and arguments. He talks excitedly of new dives to the inky world of Paleodictyon as well as the possibility of setting up a remote camera on the seabed that would try to catch a glimpse of the ancient survivor as it grows and interacts with its dark environment.
“It’s an exceptional window into the past,” he said of the creature. “Now we need to solve the mystery of what it is. We need to recover a specimen.”
The Crow Paradox
by Robert Krulwich
text sizeAAA
July 27, 2009
Here's a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them " apparently for years. But people " even people who love crows " usually can't tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.
First, how do crows tell us apart? Watch this video:
Video: The Crow Paradox
Credit: Robert Krulwich, Jason Orfanon, Alison Richards & Vikki Valentine / NPR. Illustrations by Neil Wagner.
Now, our second experiment. On you. There are crow scholars who raise, study, and even live with a crow. But once that crow flies off and joins a group, these researchers say they can no longer tell their crow apart from the others.
So let's see how well you do:
Crows Can Do This, But You Can't (16x9)
Crows have this uncanny ability to tell one human from another. And they'll hold a grudge if you do them wrong. But can you tell one crow from another?
Interactive: Crows Can Do This, But Can You?
July 27, 2009
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
[7 min 49 sec]
* Add to Playlist
* Download
* Transcript
If you want to hear researchers describe what it's like to alienate a crow, and then be razzed and harassed by its family and neighbors wherever they go " tennis courts, ATM machines, parking lots " listen to our radio story. We'll also tell you how unbelievably long a crow can keep a grudge.
@sumac,
Yes they can! Rescued a lil baby crow who thought i was his ma. Then brought him to the rescue center. Where is he now??? Probably roaming with his buds somewhere near Auburn. kids
@Stradee,
All the crows around here are really smart. Glad I didn't P one of them off......Happy face.
@danon5,
You and your 301 friends have supported 2,942,851.9 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 226,035.8 square feet.
American Prairie habitat supported: 69,234.9 square feet.
Rainforest habitat supported: 2,647,581.2 square feet.
~~~
anyone on to start a new thread ... new theme?
August 25, 2009
Cleaning of Puget Sound Brings Tribes Full Circle
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
SEATTLE " When contractors were bidding for federal stimulus money designated to help clean up Puget Sound, a few skeptical competitors asked Jeff Choke how much experience his dive team had in addressing pollution here.
“I’d say, ‘We’ve been doing it since the day the settlers first showed up,’ ” Mr. Choke said as he steered an aluminum skiff out of Shilshole Bay on an overcast afternoon recently.
Mr. Choke is a member of the Nisqually Indian tribe, one of many tribes that fished for salmon in Puget Sound for centuries before Europeans arrived and began aggressively fishing with large commercial nets that depleted populations of Chinook, sockeye and other kinds of salmon. Now the Nisqually tribe has a dive team that is part of a $4.6 million stimulus-financed effort to remove fishing nets that were lost or discarded decades ago but can still kill fish, birds and other animals.
Mr. Choke said that although having Indians get involved in the project might make for compelling symbolism given the longstanding tensions over how their way of life was altered by settlers, what the project really offers is a chance for the storyline to move beyond old debates.
“We want to diversify,” Mr. Choke said, referring to the tribe’s expanding business interests, which include casino gambling and the harvesting of geoduck clams in the sound, a pursuit that first led the tribe to start its dive team.
“Everyone has had a part in this,” Mr. Choke said, “and to clean this up, it takes both sides.”
The net-removal project is being organized by the Northwest Straits Initiative, a conservation agency authorized by Congress. The project is being held up by its supporters as an example of environmental restoration that creates jobs " about 40 in the next 18 months, many of them for divers " and has a measurable impact.
Before being awarded the stimulus money, the initiative had spent seven years piecing together small grants to slowly remove nets that were lost to rocky seafloors or artificial structures in the area’s historic fishing grounds.
“In many cases, it’s layer upon layer of net,” said Ginny Broadhurst, the director of the initiative.
With more than 3,000 nets believed to be underwater, the project was expected to take many more years to complete. Now, however, Ms. Broadhurst said the group is getting four boats up and running at sites like the San Juan Islands in the north of the sound to tribal fishing grounds in the south. The work should be finished by the end of next year.
“The ocean faces lots of problems, from acidification, the ocean becoming more acidic, to the water temperature rising and a slew of other problems, but marine debris is something that we can do something about,” said Nir Barnea, a manager in the marine debris program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that distributed the stimulus money. “This project, for example, we can complete the removal of just about all nets in Puget Sound.”
The project follows earlier net removal efforts in Alaska, Hawaii and other states.
In Puget Sound, the removal of the nets follows major changes; fish populations have declined, restrictions have increased and the fishing industry is a small fraction of what it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
Because the fishery is much smaller, Ms. Broadhurst said, the number of nets that will be lost in the future “is going to be really minimal as compared with that historic high.”
Her group has spent years surveying the sound to identify lost nets for removal. Jeff June, a field manager for the project, said the group has a database containing 584 locations of lost nets, with some locations containing several nets. Divers have found skeletons of harbor seals and porpoises tangled in nets; more often they encounter countless crabs, starfish and small fish trapped in the monofilament, which became more common in the 1970s. Those nets do not degrade the way older nets of hemp and other materials do.
When the nets are lost, said Mr. Barnea of the federal agency, “they keep on doing what they were designed to do.”
Steve Sigo owns the boat that the Nisqually tribe’s dive team has been using for its recent dives off Point Jefferson on the Kitsap Peninsula, across Puget Sound from Shilshole Bay in Seattle. Mr. Sigo, a member of the Squaxin Island tribe, said if he were not helping to remove nets he would probably be fishing for salmon, particularly given the strong runs reported this year. But Mr. Sigo, joined by his 12-year-old son, Andrew, said he planned to stick with the net-removal project as long as he could.
“My first year was ’74 fishing commercially, and so I’ve lost nets,” Mr. Sigo said. “I’ve fished up in this area, fished the San Juans, fished everything, so it’s kind of nice to be on the cleanup end of it instead of the losing-the-net end of it. It’s kind of neat because it’s kind of full circle to get this opportunity.”
@sumac,
Fabulous link and article sue!
So positive
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@Stradee,
The Native Americans sure have a lot longer history in the USA than we Palefaces.
Back in the 1970's while in the Army, I was the 9th Infantry Division, 3d Brigade Race Relations Officer. One of the things I did during Native American month was to organize a Pow Wow and showing of the drums and dances of the tribes. The whole program was to be introduced by one of the general officers at Ft Lewis, Wa. As the general began his welcoming speech - a lady named Ramona Bennet stood up and started to yell things at the general - then she started to walk up to get on the stage and continue her attack talking. The general ran from the stage and told me to stop her. I didn't feel that a good tackle was the right thing to do so I went backstage and unplugged the sound system. That didn't stop Ramona, she went up on stage and said what she wanted to say about us Palefaces and the problems Native Americans were having. (I actually thought she was correct in what she was saying but thought it was bad timing especially for me and my program.) The theater was packed with a LOT of people - Red, White, Black, Brown and Yellow. After THAT the show went on and everyone enjoyed it - except for a group of Samoans who were wanting to start a fight out front. I went out there and talked to them - they cooled down a little and didn't cause any trouble. Then on with the show...... I really enjoyed that part, it was all just great. At the end, I escourted Ramona out to her auto in the parking lot just to be safe. At that point she turned to me and said, "You really aren't as big a S--t Head as I thought at first." I took it as a compliment and said a big Thank You to her.
You can Google - Ramona Bennett at =
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/bennett.htm
She was MUCH younger then - as was I...........
@danon5,
You and your 301 friends have supported 2,942,978.9 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 226,095.0 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 301 friends have supported: (226,095.0)
American Prairie habitat supported: 69,258.3 square feet.
You have supported: (18,361.8)
Your 301 friends have supported: (50,896.5)
Rainforest habitat supported: 2,647,625.6 square feet.
You have supported: (190,143.9)
Your 301 friends have supported: (2,457,481.7)
Clicked, and on the hunt for good articles.
@sumac,
August 27, 2009
Editorial
Our Plastic Legacy Afloat
Until recently, the earth had seven continents. To that number, humans have added an eighth " an amorphous, floating mass of waste plastic trapped in a gyre of currents in the north Pacific, between Hawaii and Japan. Researchers have estimated that this garbage patch may contain as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris and is perhaps twice the size of Texas, if not larger.
Across the world’s oceans there are still many more millions of tons of floating plastic, most of it originating from land, not ships. All of this solid waste is bad news. It traps as many as a million seabirds every year, as well as some 100,000 marine mammals.
Now comes what could be more bad news. A new study, announced at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society, suggests that plastics in seawater break down faster than expected. As they do, they apparently release contaminants, including potentially harmful styrene compounds not normally found in nature. This was not merely a laboratory finding. The author of the study, Katsuhiko Saido, a scientist at Nihon University in Japan, found the same chemical compounds in seawater samples collected near Malaysia, the Pacific Northwest, and in the northern Pacific.
The effects of these broken-down plastics on marine organisms is as yet unknown, and they will be harder to measure than the damage that plastic refuse does to sea-life. But adding to the contaminant load of the oceans cannot be a good thing.
What we are seeing here is yet another of the large-scale, potentially tragic, uncontrolled experiments that humans have conducted on their environment without intending to. And though we cannot do much about the millions of tons that have already been sent to sea, we can at least begin to ask ourselves, when we get ready to pitch a plastic container, where is this likely to end up?
