This is a post by Gabrielle Dorr,NOAA/Montrose Settlements Restoration Program Outreach Coordinator.
A-49, also known as “Princess Cruz,” in her nest on Santa Cruz Island. She was the first Bald Eagle chick hatched naturally on California’s Santa Cruz Island in over 50 years. (Photo Credit: Peter Sharpe, Institute for Wildlife Studies)
We want you to take a bird’s eye view of restoration with our wildlife webcams. In 2006, NOAA’s Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, established to make up for a toxic DDT and PCB legacy in southern California, installed a live webcam with a close-up view of the first Bald Eagle nest to hatch a chick naturally on California’s Santa Cruz Island in over 50 years. Thousands watched as the eagle parents tended to their chick, affectionately named “Princess Cruz” by webcam watchers. Today, there are a total of five webcams on other nests around the California Channel Islands, highlighting the success of our Bald Eagle Restoration Program.
We also wanted to connect the public to the underwater world of wetlands with an underwater fish webcam. In 2010, our program installed a live webcam in Huntington Beach wetlands, where we completed one of our fish habitat restoration projects. This underwater camera demonstrates the importance of wetlands as a fish nursery and feeding area.
Watch Bald Eagles Live
A Bald Eagle adult and chicks in the Pelican Harbor nest on Santa Cruz Island. (Photo Credit: Kevin White, Full Frame Productions)
What is cute and cuddly and has wings? You guessed it … a Bald Eagle chick! What is even better is that you can watch these adorable birds on live webcams that are placed near Bald Eagle nests located on Catalina and Santa Cruz Islands in the California Channel Islands right now. Viewers can watch daily as both male and female adults attend to their chicks by feeding them and keeping them warm. One of the most popular nests to watch is the West End nest on Catalina Island that has triplets for the third year in a row.
For eagle enthusiasts, there is a Channel Islands Eaglecam discussion forum where you can post or read daily nest observations, chat with other enthusiasts, or read updates from the Bald Eagle restoration team. With over 1 million hits each year, the Bald Eagle webcams have captivated audiences all over the world from January to June as these regal birds raise their young.
Diving with the Fish
If you are more interested in what lurks beneath the ocean then you should check out the live fish webcam that is broadcast from Talbert Marsh in the Huntington Beach wetlands. Since the fish webcam has been live, we have observed over 20 species of fish, diving seabirds, an octopus, nudibranchs (colorful sea slugs), and numerous other cool invertebrates. We have also seen fish spawning events, territorial displays of fish, and even sharks.
If you want to let us know what you have seen on our webcam, you can fill out our online fish webcam observation sheet. In case our solar-powered camera is down, you can check out this 10 minute clip recorded from the webcam for a snapshot of what you might normally see. The eelgrass swaying side to side is mesmerizing and you can always catch a glimpse of a fish when you log onto the fish webcam. Test your fish identification skills now!
Gabrielle Dorr.
Gabrielle Dorr is the Outreach Coordinator for the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program as part of NOAA’s Restoration Center. She lives and works in Long Beach, California where she is always interacting with the local community through outreach events, public meetings, and fishing education programs.
For decades, two Alcoa alumininum facilities discharged toxic PCBs into the St. Lawrence River, its tributaries the Grasse and Raquette Rivers, and the surrounding area in Massena, N.Y. Alcoa and Reynolds are paying $19.4 million to settle the resulting damages to natural resources. (NOAA)
In the northern reaches of upstate New York, just across and upriver from Canada, two factories chug along. Both now owned by aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, these factories have been producing aluminum on the banks of the Grasse and St. Lawrence Rivers since 1903 and 1958. And like many other industries in the past, these two Alcoa plants in Massena, N.Y., discharged a stream of toxic pollutants into the water, air, and soil around them.
Now, only a few miles away, dozens of young Mohawk children at the Akwesasne Freedom School attempt to reclaim their Mohawk heritage and a connection with the natural world and traditional practices endangered in part by the area’s contaminated history.
Today, the majority of the $19.4 million settlement with Alcoa and the former Reynolds Metals Company will go toward healing past wounds to this rich ecological and cultural environment with a suite of proposed restoration projects.
A History of Pollution on the St. Lawrence
Starting in the late 1950s, Alcoa and Reynolds used polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in hydraulic fluid and electrical equipment as they produced aluminum at these two factories. Nearby, General Motors Central Foundry (GM) also used PCBs in the hydraulic fluids when building automotive engines and in electric equipment. The PCBs from these three facilities in turn made their way into the St. Lawrence River, its tributaries the Grasse and Raquette Rivers, and the surrounding area.
Banned in 1979, PCBs are a group of persistent and highly toxic compounds which, in addition to causing cancer in animals, affects growth, behavior, reproduction, immune response, and neurological development. Manufacturing activities at these three factories released a slew of other industrial pollutants [PDF] that impacted the environment, including aluminum, fluoride, cyanide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, a hazardous component of oil, coal, and tar).
In 2000, Alcoa purchased Reynolds and as a result, Reynolds’ facility is now known as Alcoa East. Its sister facility, Alcoa West, is the longest continually operating aluminum facility in the world. The third, now-shuttered, General Motors factory sits next door to Alcoa East and has already paid approximately $1.8 million for environmental restoration in separate bankruptcy proceedings. Combined with $18.5 million from Alcoa’s settlement, the Alcoa and GM settlements will provide approximately $20.3 million for specific projects to restore access to recreational fishing, fish and wildlife, and Mohawk traditional practices and language.
Moving Toward Environmental Restoration
The St. Lawrence Environmental Trustee Council, a group of federal, state, and tribal governments which includes NOAA, has coordinated with the companies to assess the damages to ecological resources, recreational fishing, and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe’s cultural resources. Due to the history of industrial pollution released from these factories into the St. Lawrence River watershed, the sediments, fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians along the St. Lawrence, Grasse, and Raquette Rivers have all suffered. Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, various cleanup activities, such as dredging and capping contaminated river sediments, have been attempting to remediate the polluted environment.
Improvements to spawning habitat and stocking of lake sturgeon is one of the restoration projects preferred by the natural resource trustees. (Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe)
As part of a process that moves beyond cleanup, the trustees, led by the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, have identified preferred recreational fishing, ecological, and cultural restoration projects to compensate the public for the resulting environmental injuries.
For example, contaminants from the three facilities degraded adult and juvenile fish habitat for species such as the American eel (currently being considered for Endangered Species Act protection) and the state-threatened lake sturgeon. The presence of toxic PCBs triggered fish consumption advisories for the St. Lawrence, Grasse, Raquette, and St. Regis Rivers. In place since 1984, these advisories have resulted in an estimated 221,000–250,000 fewer fishing trips on these rivers, both in the past and into the future. In response, four new boat launches will be constructed and one existing launch will be upgraded to provide shoreline and in-river fishing access points.
The trustees also will protect and restore wetland and upland habitat, enhance stream banks, improve impeded fish and other wildlife passage through the rivers, enhance fish stocks and spawning habitat, and restore bird habitat. The preferred restoration projects are described in the St. Lawrence River Environment Restoration Compensation and Determination Plan [PDF]. The public can comment on this plan and on the Alcoa $19.4 million natural resource damage settlement, which includes $18.5 million for restoration and nearly $1 million in reimbursement for past environmental assessment costs.
Reconnecting to the Natural World
One of the most creative examples of the preferred restoration projects centers not on restoring natural resources such as sturgeon, a species important to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, but on restoring the unique culture of the Mohawks, which is tied closely to the natural world.
A tribal apprenticeship program will work to restore traditional Mohawk cultural practices, including basketmaking. (Akwesasne Museum and Cultural Center)
Grassy meadows on both sides of the Lower Grasse River were set aside for the Mohawks of Akewsasne by the Seven Nations of Canada Treaty of 1796. The name Akwesasne means “the land where the partridge drums,” a reference to the sound created by the rapids of the St. Lawrence River prior to the construction of dams.
The people of Akwesasne were directly impacted by the contamination from the Alcoa, Reynolds, and GM factories. An innovative tribal apprenticeship program will seek to restore traditional Mohawk cultural practices that have been lost or impaired since contamination limited use of the uplands, the rivers, and their natural resources. The tribe, as a trustee, has targeted four traditional areas for apprentices to receive hands-on training from experienced masters:
Water, fishing, and use of the river.
Horticulture and basketmaking.
Medicinal plants and healing.
Hunting and trapping.
The apprenticeship program will provide experience in directly harvesting, preparing, preserving, and producing traditional Mohawk cultural products while promoting Mohawk language in each aspect of the training.
Restoration funding also will support existing institutions and programs focused on recovering cultural practices and language injured by contaminants from these manufacturing sites.
During NOAA’s Science of Oil Spills classes, the U.S. Coast Guard and other oil spill responders gain practical knowledge they can put to work while protecting our nation’s coasts. (NOAA)
NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, a leader in providing scientific information in response to marine pollution, has scheduled its annual Science of Oil Spills (SOS) class for June 25–28, 2013, in Seattle.
We will accept applications for this class through May 10 and notify applicants regarding their application status no later than May 24, 2013.
SOS classes help spill responders increase their understanding of oil spill science when analyzing spills and making risk-based decisions. They are designed for new and mid-level spill responders.
These three-and-a-half-day trainings cover:
Fate and behavior of oil spilled in the environment.
An introduction to oil chemistry and toxicity.
A review of basic spill response options for open water and shorelines.
Spill case studies.
Principles of ecological risk assessment.
A field trip.
An introduction to damage assessment techniques.
Determining cleanup endpoints.
To view the topics for the next SOS class, download a sample agenda [PDF, 117 KB].
Please be advised that classes are not filled on a first-come, first-served basis. The Office of Response and Restoration tries to diversify the participant composition to ensure a variety of perspectives and experiences to enrich the workshop for the benefit of all participants. The class will be limited to 40 participants. No other SOS classes are planned through fiscal year 2013 (ending September 30).
For more information, and to learn how to apply for the class, visit the SOS Classes page on the Office of Response and Restoration website.
NOAA’s heritage stretches back far: The NOAA Coast and Geodetic Survey Steamer PATTERSON was in service on the Pacific Ocean from 1884-1919. It’s shown here in Wailuku, Hawaii, in 1913. (NOAA)
It’s NOAA Heritage Week: Explore your world and learn how NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—takes the pulse of the planet every day and protects and manages ocean and coastal resources.
The week of Feb. 4, NOAA is hosting a series of free lunchtime presentations at the Gateway to NOAA exhibit on a variety of timely topics. It started with ocean acidification’s effects on oysters and ends Friday with microscopic images of ocean life. Gateway to NOAA is located at 1325 East-West Highway in Silver Spring, Maryland.
NOAA Heritage Week Open House in Maryland
Join us on NOAA’s Silver Spring, Maryland, campus on Saturday, Feb. 9 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. for free activities, including engaging talks by NOAA experts, interactive exhibits, special tours, and hands-on activities for ages 5 and up.
Meet and talk with scientists, weather forecasters, hurricane hunter pilots, and others who work to understand our environment, protect life and property, and conserve and protect natural resources. Look forward to making origami whales, viewing seahorse X-rays, building an ocean buoy, or getting “shocked” learning about lightning safety with NOAA.
Visit www.noaa.gov/openhouse for details. Adults, please bring a photo ID to enter this federal facility.
Protecting America’s Heritage
In communities across America, NOAA is preserving the nation’s heritage. For example, NOAA promotes the message that our heritage resources belong to everyone, and that we all have a role to play in preserving them for future generations. NOAA’s Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary offers a Web-based shipwreck trail that highlights the region’s rich maritime history and encourages the public to visit the Keys and dive the trail’s nine carefully chosen, mapped, and interpreted sites. Learn more at http://preserveamerica.noaa.gov/welcome.html.
A team of about a dozen staff and volunteers organized by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife made quick work of removing marine organisms from the dock on the sand at Agate Beach, Ore. The dock has been confirmed as having gone missing from a Japanese port after the March 2011 tsunami. (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife)
On December 20, 2012, President Obama signed legislation reauthorizing the NOAA Marine Debris Program [PDF] and its mission to address the harmful impacts of marine debris on the United States. The program, which is housed within NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, was originally created in 2006 by the Marine Debris Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act.
“The NOAA Marine Debris Program is grateful for Congress’s support on this very important issue,” said Nancy Wallace, the program’s director. “We look forward to continuing our work to ensure the ocean and its coasts, users, and inhabitants are free from the impacts of marine debris.”
For the most part, the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s mandates remain the same: to identify, determine sources of, assess, prevent, reduce, and remove debris, whether along a North Carolina beach or in Lake Michigan. This latest legislation, which was combined with the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act, also highlights education and outreach, regional coordination, and fishing gear research as key activities for the program.
However, Congress gave the NOAA Marine Debris Program a new core function to address “severe marine debris events,” defined as “atypically large amounts of marine debris” caused by natural disasters. After debris such as floating docks from the March 2011 Japan tsunami began washing up on West Coast beaches, Congress recognized this emerging need to deal with the unusual amounts and types of marine debris which often follow events such as tsunamis or hurricanes.
Most of us have seen marine debris in its smaller forms—water bottles, plastic bags and other consumer waste. But it can also take the form of abandoned vessels, drifting fishing nets, and even lost crab pots on the ocean bottom, still catching sea life long after they are lost.
NOAA marine debris expert Peter Murphy has some fun teaching a child about trash in our oceans. (NOAA)
Peter Murphy is the Alaska Coordinator for the NOAA Marine Debris Program, which supports national and global efforts to research, prevent, and reduce the impacts of marine debris. Murphy and his colleagues work to understand these impacts and communicate them to policy-makers, stakeholders, and the public. Alaska, with its massive and remote coastline, significant coastal resources, and strong marine economy and culture, is a dynamic and important part of the marine debris landscape.
Here, Murphy gives us the insider view of working at NOAA and what it takes to help keep trash off our coasts and out of the ocean.
However, there’s something people can do about it by making more sustainable choices in what they use, how they use it, and how they dispose of it. Doing research on the impacts and finding ways to communicate those findings to change behaviors is an important link that we work to make in the Marine Debris Program. I focus on Alaska, which has more coastline than the rest of the United States combined and a huge amount of natural resources, so there is even more opportunity for impact and for action.
What part of your job with NOAA did you least expect to be doing?
Working with detection technologies—satellites, radar, and especially sonar—was definitely an unexpected element of my work, but a very rewarding one. Translating sonar tracks into a map that guides divers to retrieve and examine crab pots 100 feet below the surface is a fun challenge.
If you could invent any tool to make your work more efficient and cost were no object, what would it be? Why?
First: A remote sensor that could definitively and reliably detect debris greater than one millimeter in size. One of our challenges is that we know there are areas of concentration in the open ocean, but when they go undetected, we don’t know if it is because there isn’t anything there to detect (unlikely) or because our sensors can’t pick up everything that’s there (more likely). Knowing that would help our work in assessing density, impacts, and behavior of debris.
Second: A small, sturdy, reliable, and inexpensive device to convert plastics (including Styrofoam) into liquid fuel. Small communities in Alaska often do beach cleanups, but have nowhere to put the debris—primarily plastics—that washes ashore from all over the Pacific Rim. This would give them a way to not only empty their landfills, but provide a direct benefit in the form of energy for the work they do.
How did you become interested in communicating about science?
As I learned more about the oceans and the fascinating interconnections across the many systems that make it all work, I wanted to be able to explain and share that information in an accessible way. Seeing a concept—derelict fishing gear, ocean circulation, or plastic degradation—click for somebody at a booth we’re hosting or during a presentation we’re giving is a great feeling.
When did you know you wanted to pursue a career in science?
I was always fascinated with how things worked. My grandfather, an engineer at Boeing, gave me a subscription to Popular Mechanics as a kid, and I became fascinated with how people worked to innovate and solve problems using science. That respect and fascination stuck with me all through school.
This is a post by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Anna Manyak.
Although consumer debris is the most commonly collected item during beach cleanups, below the water lies another form of debris that is equally prevalent and harmful: derelict fishing gear. Defined as gear that has been lost or abandoned in the marine environment, derelict fishing gear poses a huge threat to marine organisms and the environment through impacts such as entanglements and ghost fishing. It consists of any items used for recreational or commercial fishing activities, such as nets, pots, ropes, and fishing line.
A derelict stone crab pot rests on the bottom of the ocean in waters off the Florida coast. (NOAA)
When the Marine Debris Program was established through the Marine Debris Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act of 2006, the program was charged with the “development of effective non-regulatory measures and incentives to cooperatively reduce the volume of lost and discarded fishing gear and to aid in its recovery.” In essence, we needed to develop a program to keep fishing gear from becoming marine debris. Enter the Fishing for Energy program.
Fishing for Energy is a partnership between Covanta Energy, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the NOAA Marine Debris Program, and Schnitzer Steel, designed to provide a cost free disposal solution for derelict or otherwise unusable fishing gear to commercial fishermen across the nation. The program gives fishermen a place to dispose of derelict gear they come across while on the water and eases the financial burden associated with the disposal of unusable fishing gear in landfills. By placing bins at busy fishing ports, the program significantly increases the likelihood that derelict gear does not become marine debris.
Disposing of derelict fishing gear in a Fishing for Energy bin. Photo courtesy of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
How does Fishing for Energy work? The partnership strategically places dumpsters at busy fishing ports around the country, where commercial fishermen can easily dispose of old, unusable fishing gear.
Full dumpsters of collected gear are then transported to local Schnitzer Steel facility, where metal gear is recycled and nets and pots are sheared for easier disposal. From there, the gear is brought to the local Covanta Energy facility where gear, such as ropes and nets, are burned as a source of renewable energy to power local communities.
Today, Fishing for Energy is represented in 9 states and 31 ports across the country. Since its establishment in 2008, about 750 tons of gear (nearly 1.5 million pounds!) have been prevented from becoming marine debris.
Interested in learning more? Follow our Fishing for Energy blog series as we dive deeper into the issue of derelict fishing gear and the process of turning marine debris into energy.
This is a post by the Office of Response and Restoration’s Mary Evans.
Dealing with a major oil spill is a huge effort, sometimes requiring billions of dollars and involving hundreds, even thousands of people. Yet, oil is a natural material that seeps from the ground or into the ocean in many locations around the world.
So why is it so important to respond to an oil spill, anyway? The main reason is that oil is also a toxic material that can cause environmental damage where it spills. The central purpose of oil spill response is to reduce that damage.
Toxic Effects
We call something toxic if it harms living things. The amount of harm caused depends on how an organism is exposed and to how much oil. For example, crude oil is considered toxic and causes two main kinds of injury: physical and biochemical.
Dr. Brian Stacy, NOAA veterinarian, prepares to clean an oiled Kemp’s Ridley turtle during the response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill. Veterinarians and scientists from NOAA, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, and other partners worked under the Unified Command to capture heavily-oiled young turtles 20 to 40 miles offshore as part of animal rescue and rehabilitation efforts. Credit: NOAA and Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
The physical effects of freshly spilled crude oil are all too obvious. You’ve likely seen the disturbing images of birds and other animals coated in crude oil, struggling to survive. When oil washes ashore, it can completely cover and smother the plants and animals living there. Crude oil not only destroys the insulating properties of animal fur and bird feathers, which can lead to hypothermia, but it also impairs animals’ abilities to fly and swim, sometimes causing oiled animals to drown.
During the months after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, researchers collected about 30,000 dead birds–ranging over 90 different species–from the oiled areas, and they estimated that perhaps ten times as many birds died.
Spilled oil also can harm life because its chemical constituents are poisonous. As we previously learned, petroleum-derived oil is a complex mixture of thousands of chemical compounds. Given oil’s chemical complexity, we need to consider how these different components—and their very different effects on living things—cause harm.
Breaking It Down
Let’s look at two important components of crude oil: volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). In terms of how long they remain in the environment, they represent two ends of a spectrum.
All crude oil contains VOCs, which readily evaporate into the air, giving crude oil a distinctive odor. Some VOCs are acutely toxic when inhaled, in addition to being potentially cancer-causing. At the site of a fresh oil spill, these VOCs can threaten nearby residents, responders working on the spill, air-breathing marine mammals, and sea turtles at the water surface. However, VOCs are generally a response concern only right after oil is spilled, because oil floating on the sea surface quickly loses its VOCs.
Years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, heavy residual oiling remains in sediments of Smith Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska, June 2011. (David Janka, R/V Auklet, NOAA)
In contrast, PAHs can persist in the environment for many years, in some cases continuing to harm organisms long after the oil first spills. How PAHs in oil do that is an active area of research.
For example, our colleagues at NOAA’s Auke Bay Laboratory near Juneau, Alaska, investigated the possible biological effects of oil that spilled from the Exxon Valdez in 1989 but still remains at very low concentrations in weathered oil in beach sediments at locations scattered around Prince William Sound.
The Auke Bay Lab researchers conducted a series of studies that continued for more than a decade. They found that even though the levels of PAHs leaching from weathered oil buried in beach sediments were very low, the PAHs still caused negative effects to incubating herring and salmon eggs. The good news from these studies is that over the years, the concentration of PAHs has declined in the Sound’s beach sediments, to the point that those particular toxic effects on fish eggs have diminished as well. However, at a few sites in the Sound, sea otters are eating clams that may continue to be contaminated by leaching PAHs in buried oil.
The Northwest Fisheries Science Center, another NOAA research laboratory in Seattle, Wash., has studied the chemical physiology of how PAHs harm developing fish. The researchers found that some PAHs in oil inhibit proper heart development in fish embryos, which can either kill the fish outright or make them more susceptible to predation and disease.
With so many varying factors coming into play, predicting the impacts of an oil spill can be quite challenging. It’s important to know the specific chemical makeup of an oil (and how that makeup changes over time as the oil weathers). This information will give us clues about how that oil will interact with organisms and the environment and, hopefully, will help us figure out how to keep those impacts low.
Mary Evans provides science communication and research analysis support to OR&R’s Emergency Response Division in Seattle. She develops educational and training materials and research reports, helps out with oil spill responses and the division’s training programs, and has taught emergency response courses in the U.S. and abroad.
Plastic of the “disposable” variety. (Alex Smith, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)
Today, we live an era dominated by plastics—versatile, ubiquitous, “disposable” plastics. In this “Age of Plastic,” enter Odile Madden, a research scientist studying historic plastic artifacts at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute.
Using her training in materials science, Madden works to understand the materials—from their condition to their chemical composition—used in Smithsonian exhibits. She preserves these materials for as long as possible so that everyone who visits the museums can continue to enjoy these pieces of cultural history. The sensitive nature of the work demands non-invasive techniques that will not harm the artifact. It’s a cool job.
It also stands in stark contrast to environmental conservation, which depends on materials that break down quickly and do not stick around a long time. For example, an abandoned fishing net drifting in the open ocean will have a much lower chance of accidentally ensnaring marine life (“ghost-fishing”) if it breaks down quickly.
As a marine biologist with the NOAA Marine Debris Program, I work on the opposite end of the plastics spectrum from Madden. She and her team of cultural conservationists strive to maintain the integrity of valuable plastic artifacts, while at NOAA we’re trying to conserve marine environments by, for example, getting rid of plastic debris.
Madden’s continued interest in pursuing the technical and philosophical issues surrounding plastic use prompted her to coordinate the recent interdisciplinary symposium, “The Age of Plastic: Ingenuity and Responsibility.” Presentations covered everything from the space program’s use of plastics to the history of synthetic fibers. They also examined the challenges of preserving plastic in museums and of recycling plastics at the end of their lifecycles and had an open look at how plastics are perhaps indispensable in science and human health.
Nancy Wallace, program director for the NOAA Marine Debris Program, participated in an equally engaging panel discussion, where she highlighted the potential hazards of plastics that unintentionally end up as marine debris. (In other words, we brought up the negative side of plastics.)
Still, I walked away with two particularly refreshing perspectives from outside my world of marine debris:
The difference between “conservationists”: Museums use “conservation” to mean saving materials, while environmentalists use “conservation” to mean saving the natural environment. Museums want the material to last as long as possible while we at NOAA would be happy if plastics degraded quickly into its molecular components: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. (The scientist in me needs to point out that the word “plastic” captures incredible variation in material type and structure. “Synthetic polymer” is more accurate, but alas, it doesn’t have public cachet.)
The difference in values: The use of a material often defines its value. Materials that are meant to be art are arguably more valuable than materials used in life. Probably few people would disagree that there is an intrinsic difference in a resin sculpture housed at the Smithsonian versus the one-time-use spoon you pick up at the cafeteria. But we must ensure that materials are used and disposed of correctly, in ways that respect their value. Plastics are valuable— they were invented for a reason and serve a lot of fantastic purposes— but have become significantly devalued in today’s throw-away culture.
A cellulose nitrate Victorian Black Comb (ca 1890). Celluloid novelties made to imitate precious materials such as ivory and tortoise shell were popular from about 1880 to the 1930s. (Smithsonian Institution Collections Search Center)
I’d like to draw attention to another, unfortunately ironic, conservation connection. In his keynote speech, Robert Friedel of the University of Maryland pointed out that in the early days of synthetics, objects were created to imitate natural materials. In part, this was done to stop poaching of hawksbill sea turtles for tortoiseshell and elephant tusks for ivory. I thought, how interesting: Materials once used to conserve nature now occur in such quantity that natural environments are at risk from them.
Nevertheless, it was clear from this symposium that people care: both about preserving museum artifacts and about the baby albatross that chokes on ingested plastic bits. There are so many different, equally valuable perspectives on the use of plastics. All of these perspectives are needed if we are to move forward, as a society, with a more thoughtful approach to material use and conservation.
While everything may be bigger in Texas, some reports about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” would lead you to believe that this marine mass of plastic is bigger than Texas—maybe twice as big as the Lone Star State, or even twice as big as the continental U.S.
For NOAA, a national science agency, separating science from science fiction about the Pacific garbage patch (and other “garbage patches”) is important when answering people’s questions about what it is and how we should deal with the problem. (For the record, no scientifically sound estimates exist for the size or mass of these garbage patches.)
Marine debris accumulation locations in the North Pacific Ocean.
The NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige takes down two myths floating around with the rest of the debris about the garbage patches in a recent post on the Marine Debris Blog:
There is no “garbage patch,” a name which conjures images of a floating landfill in the middle of the ocean, with miles of bobbing plastic bottles and rogue yogurt cups. Morishige explains this misnomer:
While it’s true that these areas have a higher concentration of plastic than other parts of the ocean, much of the debris found in these areas are small bits of plastic (microplastics) that are suspended throughout the water column. A comparison I like to use is that the debris is more like flecks of pepper floating throughout a bowl of soup, rather than a skim of fat that accumulates (or sits) on the surface.
There are many “garbage patches,” and by that, we mean that trash congregates to various degrees in numerous parts of the Pacific and the rest of the ocean. These natural gathering points appear where rotating currents, winds, and other ocean features converge to accumulate marine debris, as well as plankton, seaweed, and other sea life. (Find out more about these “convergence zones” in the ocean and a NOAA study of marine debris concentrations in the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone [PDF].)
Any way you look at these “peppery soups” of plastic in the Pacific, none of the debris should be there. The NOAA Marine Debris website and blog have lots of great information and references if you want to learn more about the garbage patch issue.
*Updated July 10, 2012. **Updated Jan. 28, 2013 to correct a statement incorrectly identifying the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone as what is referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
