Trashing the island
By Charlie Gillis - Monday, January 24, 2011 - 10 Comments
Why the ‘garbage patch’ in the mid-Pacific is not nearly the disaster it’s been made out to be
Jonathan Alcorn/Keystone Press
The sea, as any poet will tell you, invites metaphor, and scientists are as susceptible to its powers as those who deal in tropes. Having surveyed the stew of shattered plastic, discarded tires and floating refrigerators gathering in the mid-Pacific, the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer raised a worldwide alarm a decade ago about a burgeoning “garbage patch”—the result of centripetal ocean currents and convergent weather patterns in a vast, subtropical swirl known as the North Pacific Gyre. To say the least, this label captured the public imagination. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch shot up the hierarchy of environmental causes, garnering the sort of attention reserved for clear-cut logging, or global warming.
But it wasn’t enough to sate today’s multi-platform media monster. By 2005, the fervid accounts of eco-bloggers and mainstream journalists were elevating the patch to an “island”—as if you could step from the deck of a boat and walk across it. Oprah Winfrey’s website described it as “the world’s largest trash dump” and “the most shocking thing” the TV host had “ever seen.” “Estimated to be twice the size of Texas, it swirls across the Pacific from California to Japan,” the site proclaimed, notwithstanding the fact Oprah had never seen it first-hand. “In some places, it’s 300 feet deep and has killed millions of sea birds and marine mammals.”
Er, not quite, says Angelicque White, an oceanographer who has actually visited the gyre. Based on water samples and data gathered during a research voyage in 2008, the Oregon State University scientist last week issued an analysis letting a lot of air out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, describing it not so much as an island or even a patch, but as a highly diffuse soup, in which tiny shards of plastic float metres, if not kilometres apart. “Imagine 1,000 one-litre bottles sitting in front you, all full of water from this area,” she says from her office in Corvallis, Ore. “Three to five of those bottles would have one piece of plastic the size of a pencil eraser. It’s not twice the size of Texas. You can’t see it from space. It’s not even something you can see from the deck of a ship.”
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Reading flotsam
By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 1 Comment
A top oceanographer studies the signals of the floating world
In November, when a disembodied foot washed ashore near Richmond, B.C.—the seventh found in the area in a 16-month period (one was revealed to be a hoax)—the media knew whom to call for insight: Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an expert of all that floats on the sea. Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, has made a career of what he calls “the floating world”: the trash and treasure that ride the ocean’s currents, sometimes for thousands of kilometres, before eventually washing up on the beach. What most of us might consider junk—a piece of plywood, a metal canister, an old sneaker—is, to him, a font of information. The ocean, he explains, has 11 “gyres”: continuous loops made up of smaller currents, each as distinct as the scales on a snake’s back. He believes these gyres are among the earth’s greatest features, sweeping everything, from people to plastic to water itself, around the globe. And flotsam is a language of sorts. “It’s what the ocean is writing to us,” he says. “Those are her characters. I want to know what they mean.”The world’s foremost beachcomber, Ebbesmeyer spent his childhood in California’s landlocked San Fernando Valley. “We were close enough to the water to pine for it,” he writes in a book co-written with environmental reporter Eric Scigliano, out March 24. Flotsametrics and the Floating World is part autobiography, part glimpse into the science of the sea; just like flotsam on the beach, facts and legends about Ebbesmeyer’s work are sprinkled throughout.
