Our second post comes from our Teacher at Sea, Lara Dickens. Lara is a science teacher at Patrick Henry High School in San Diego, CA. This is Lara’s second blog post.
Lara writes:
It is always good for a teacher to take on the role of a student. It is humbling and refreshing to learn new things about science content, life on a ship and yourself. The grad students have been amazingly patient and crazy enthusiastic to share their finds.
But the honeymoon is over, we are at the Patch. Everyone is still wonderfully supportive, but the mood has changed slightly. If we hadn’t found a mess, it would have seemed like a waste of time. Confirming that there is a concentration of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre is both reassuring that they have the skills to find it and depressing to know it exists.
Now the task at hand is to determine how to make sense of it. It isn’t a large island of plastic. It is a soup of bits, pieces and strands. If you look out over the water you see a beautiful cobalt blue ocean. If you look down you see a little bits of things that were once important to someone probably 1,000 miles away.
The researchers are collecting sample after sample of water. Most of the water has plastic in it. With the obvious and already stated fact that the ocean is huge, it is the job of the scientist to put the numbers into perspective. The unrealistic pressure to have a conclusion or solution before we dock in Newport, Oregon next week is on. Right now they are still trying to define the situation. At this point we only have samples.
The CTD, manta net, bongo nets and Oozeki trawl all sample the water a little bit differently. But I will use our primary sampling device, the manta, to describe what one sample represents. A specific amount of water will flow through the manta opening during a timed sampling. The amount of water is determined using a flowmeter. That volume of water will filter through the nets and specimens will collect near the end for you to retrieve. At that point you can only say that you filtered that much water and it had that much stuff in it. There is a very specific sampling protocol you must follow for the sample to be valid. You can only say something about what you collected at that point in time. It takes a lot more runs and some statistical processing to put any weight to your find. We have sampled in the rain, in the middle of a salp bloom, at night, during the day, and under a variety of other conditions. All we can say right now is that plastic is here and here is very, very far away from land.
Miriam Goldstein (left) and Mario Aguilera deploy a manta net in the North Pacific Gyre.
At numerous areas of the gyre, flecks of plastic are prevalent and easily spotted against the deep blue sea water.
On Aug. 11, SEAPLEX researchers encountered a large net with tangled rope, net, plastic, and various marine organisms attached to it.
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Lara, I found your blog and those of the others very interesting. This must be a tremendous experience for all of you not to mention the ground work you are all laying for the greater understanding of how we are effecting the earth. I look forward to hearing about the adventure when we are all back at Patrick Henry/
By: Tom Bricke on August 12, 2009
at 4:19 pm
Ugh! Would you look at that big mess of a net (aka TRASH). The water looks so clear and so blue, yet it has to contain such unfortunate trash that seems to be afloat for who knows how long in the middle of beautiful Pacific. People ought to wake up after seeing this kind of horrifying display and think twice of where they put these kind of trash material. This is quite an embarrassing display for a human being to use ocean as their landfill. What an eye-opener display right there. Made me sick….
By: April on August 12, 2009
at 9:56 pm
I have been following the expedition closely — not only is it great research, the daily updates are addicting! I’ve wondered for a while what it really looks like out there. I hear stories and read news reports but I don’t know whether to think of it a huge landfill or what – I haven’t seen a picture yet until your posts. Though I am eager to read the scientific findings, I am almost just as interested to hear your accounts, like Lara’s today, of what it looks like to the casual observer. I teach 5th grade science and I know it’s hard for the students (and us, too) to realize there’s something wrong with an ecosystem when we can look at it simply and all appears normal. Thank you for the work you are doing out there, helping ordinary people like me to know what’s really going on and why it’s important that we reverse whatever is causing it.
By: Mark Dersom on August 12, 2009
at 10:48 pm
Hello friends! You look to be having a very successful cruise! I admit that I was skeptical that the cruise would yield real quantitative samples of plastic, but I’m impressed (and disappointed) that you guys seem to be doing just that. Sad… disturbing… pitiful… but congratulations! I’ll be interested to hear what else you have discovered and if Pete sees progression of plastics up the food chain and down the water column.
Any mahi mahi around those artificial kelp patties? Seems like fishing might be good there. Toss a line in for me.
Fair winds and following seas,
Ryan
By: Ryan on August 13, 2009
at 8:30 am
From Mike’s post, plastic has been found in 100% of the surface trawls. Are you getting plastics in the mid-depth and/or CDC samplings? If so, what’s the deepest sample showing any plastic content? I’m
more than a little curious about the 3D nature of the problem.
By: Bob Allen on August 16, 2009
at 12:03 am
There has been plastic in all of the trawls and in the CTD, but we won’t have a good idea of how it compares to the surface abundances until complete counts are completed and tow volumes are calculated. This probably won’t be finished until several months after the cruise.
By: Alison Cawood on August 17, 2009
at 1:44 pm
wow! that last picture in this post is so compelling. just a heap of trash and ropes floating along in the sea.
By: DNLee on August 16, 2009
at 12:31 am