{"id":6034,"date":"2018-03-02T15:37:59","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T10:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6034"},"modified":"2018-03-04T15:48:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T10:48:15","slug":"15-year-study-indicates-huge-increase-in-pacific-ocean-microplastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6034","title":{"rendered":"15-Year Study Indicates Huge Increase in Pacific Ocean Microplastics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Moore, who first sailed the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997, has returned five times over 15 years to document the concentrations of plastic in the ocean. His results show microplastics are accumulating at a rapid\u00a0rate.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Plastic bottle floating in the Pacific Ocean.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1997, sailboat captain Charles Moore sailed from Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean, taking a shortcut to his home port of Los Angeles after a sailing race. As he cut across the then-seldom-sailed stretch of ocean \u2013 the swirling North Pacific Gyre \u2013 he came upon an enormous accumulation of plastic trash and made it famous. He helped captured the public\u2019s imagination around the problem of marine plastic pollution by writing about the \u201cGreat Pacific Garbage\u00a0Patch.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Monday, two decades after his discovery, he reported a seemingly dramatic 60-fold increase in the tiny pieces of microplastic during his 15 years of study of the now-infamous ocean area. From 1999 to 2014, he and a team of researchers regularly returned to 11 sites across this area with\u00a0Algalita, the nonprofit he founded, scooping up plastic samples using a manta trawl from Moore\u2019s research catamaran in an attempt to quantify change in plastic over\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

His findings, he said in a press conference\u00a0at the\u00a0American Geophysical Union\u2019s 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting\u00a0in Portland, Oregon, show that the tiny pieces of microplastic floating on the surface of the North Pacific Gyre haver increased from 331,809 pieces per square kilometer counted in 1999 to 19,912,037 counted in 2014. This estimate is unique as there are no long-term studies documenting microplastic concentration increases in the North Pacific Gyre. That\u2019s because scientists need an enormous number of samples to come to any conclusion about how concentrations change over\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

However, there is also plenty of uncertainty in making these kinds of estimates. The center of the North Pacific\u2019s swirling mass of water, which holds the highest plastic concentration, appears to be shifting over time, making accurate sampling more challenging. At the meeting, Moore clicked through slides of the North Pacific Gyre, modeled by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the University of Hawaii. The slides showed that the large gyre has a concentrated center that has shifted over time closer to the California\u00a0coast.<\/p>\n

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Moore\u2019s research ship, Alguita, returns with these samples after four months in the North Pacific Ocean.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe gyre is not a static place and what our hypothesis is \u2026 was the amount of plastic sampled depends on how far it is from the moving center of the Garbage Patch,\u201d Moore said. The results of his research will be published later this\u00a0year.<\/p>\n

While the North Pacific Gyre is commonly referred to as the \u201cGreat Pacific Garbage Patch,\u201d now Moore and other scientists like to describe the area instead as a soup filled with various-sized pieces of plastic debris. Although the patch is certainly enormous, its exact size is difficult to pinpoint because it is always shifting between the coasts of Hawaii and California, with a highly concentrated center that moves seasonally and over time with changing ocean\u00a0conditions.<\/p>\n

When making their calculations about the amount of plastic in the gyre, Maximenko and Hafner developed models that helped correct variability in ocean conditions due to currents, winds and waves. These factors can push plastic pieces down temporarily beneath the surface where they aren\u2019t scooped up by researchers\u2019 plastic trawling equipment, which only skims the ocean\u2019s surface. Even when using these models, the amount of plastic still increased by a significant amount, Moore\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Marcus Eriksen, marine plastic researcher and co-founder of ocean conservation organization 5 Gyres, said that while Moore\u2019s study is an interesting analysis, he questions how accurate it could be because of how many plastic samples are needed to draw a conclusion about trends. In 2014, using the same trawl-sampling techniques as Moore, Eriksen co-authored a\u00a0study\u00a0estimating that globally\u00a0at least\u00a05.25\u00a0trillion plastic piecesare floating at or near the ocean\u2019s surface \u2013 with nearly two trillion in the North Pacific Ocean alone. Moore, citing his data, believes that study\u2019s estimates for the North Pacific numbers may be an\u00a0underestimate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my experience, if you sample the same spot one hour later, you\u2019ll likely find a significant difference in plastic count and weight,\u201d said Eriksen. \u201cWhile the authors are probably correct about an increasing trend \u2013 and it is also difficult to understand the influence of the 2011 Japan tsunami event \u2013 we need more samples over time to really understand what\u2019s going\u00a0on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Algalita Marine Research Foundation has been studying ocean plastic pollution since 1999. Long Beach, California,\u00a0USA<\/p><\/div>\n

Moore acknowledges the variability in sampling for plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, and agrees on a need for more samples. But he emphasized that what\u2019s certain is that the amount of plastic in the oceans is increasing as humans increase their production of the\u00a0material.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur plastic production will triple by 2050 and that\u2019s when it\u2019s predicted to be half-plastic, half-fish in the ocean\u201d by weight, said Moore, citing a\u00a0plastic impact estimate\u00a0published by the World Economic Forum. \u201cBut we\u2019re continuing to extract more and more fish, we\u2019re making more and more fish sick, we\u2019re catching more and more fish in ghost nets \u2026 so the estimate of half-plastic, half-fish by 2050 may be\u00a0optimistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.newsdeeply.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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