Researchers study 18,000 hours of deep sea footage, find ocean seafloor is covered in trash (Video)
http://www.treehugger.com/ocean-conserv ... trash.html (http://www.treehugger.com/ocean-conservation/researchers-study-18000-hours-deep-sea-footage-ocean-seafloor-covered-trash.html)
QuoteWe've all seen images of trash on beaches, or floating on the surface of the ocean. But a surprising amount ends up on the deep seafloor, at depths so great that it's been very hard for us to really know what the situation is. Because it's no very practical to fund a deep sea mission just to look for trash, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute instead decided to comb through thousands of hours of video recorded by remotely controlled vehicles over the past 20+ years, specifically looking for debris.
About 1/3 of the trash were made of plastic, more than half of those being plastic bags, which are notoriously dangerous for marine life. Next were metal objects, at about 1/5 of the total. Other common debris included rope, fishing equipment, glass bottles, paper, and cloth items.
Because of deep sea conditions (very cold water, little oxygen, few bacteria), all of this trash will likely stick around much longer than it would do on the ground.
:(
Interestingly enough, this might make the sea bottom a huge treasure trove of archeological finds.
I've passed square miles of floating garbage at sea, and the last time was in the early '80s, so it can only have gotten worse since then.
Quote from: "Plu"Interestingly enough, this might make the sea bottom a huge treasure trove of archeological finds.
"Our studies have concluded that vast quantities of material was sacrificed to a single god, each piece having that god's name somewhere on the item. We therefore believe that CHINA was the most important god of the era."
What a shocker.
Our species is so selfish we focus only on our own homes, and when magically the smoke dissipates and the trash truck takes our garbage away, it doesn't go anywhere, it disappears like a like David Copperfield making a jet "disappear".
I wonder how much of it is helicopters and planes still in moth balls that were being dumped overboard during Vietnam to make the records correct? :shock: Believe me it happened. Solitary
It's probably more of that than you think. Almost every economic model we've ever came up with makes trash something you dump, not process. As a result, we have a lot of it.
Quote from: "Gawdzilla Sama"Quote from: "Plu"Interestingly enough, this might make the sea bottom a huge treasure trove of archeological finds.
"Our studies have concluded that vast quantities of material was sacrificed to a single god, each piece having that god's name somewhere on the item. We therefore believe that CHINA was the most important god of the era."
Ha!
I snorted.
:lol:
Quote from: "Gawdzilla Sama"I've passed square miles of floating garbage at sea, and the last time was in the early '80s, so it can only have gotten worse since then.
Some of it is a hazard to navigation, too.
Quote from: "SGOS"Quote from: "Gawdzilla Sama"I've passed square miles of floating garbage at sea, and the last time was in the early '80s, so it can only have gotten worse since then.
Some of it is a hazard to navigation, too.
Yep, the seawater intake to our condensers were 42" in diameter. Get a load of trash into that and the engine has to be shut down while we go in and remove it by hand. If both engine get trashed you have a large warship drifting like berg.
Quote from: "Gawdzilla Sama"Quote from: "SGOS"Quote from: "Gawdzilla Sama"I've passed square miles of floating garbage at sea, and the last time was in the early '80s, so it can only have gotten worse since then.
Some of it is a hazard to navigation, too.
Yep, the seawater intake to our condensers were 42" in diameter. Get a load of trash into that and the engine has to be shut down while we go in and remove it by hand. If both engine get trashed you have a large warship drifting like berg.
Yep, 42" is big enough to accommodate all kinds of trash. No limit to what you can fit in there.
A lot of that is mine.
Is there even a real solution to the problems dealing with garbage?
If only we could launch it into the Sun. Yep, it's gonna happen...eventually....maybe.... :-$
Launching it into the sun isn't dealing with the garbage problem. Recycling is. And we're slowly getting there, but there's still a long way to go.
Quote from: "Plu"Launching it into the sun isn't dealing with the garbage problem. Recycling is. And we're slowly getting there, but there's still a long way to go.
The garbage will cease to exist and not be able to pollute ANYTHING. I think that is a pretty healthy definition of dealing with it.
I cant society existing long enough to have a recycle-based system. We simply are not that bright of species, as much as we like to think otherwise.
Sure, it's effective but it's not exactly efficient, let alone sustainable. I mean; we thought along the exact same lines when we came up with the "just dump it in the ocean" plan, and look where that brought us. Just throwing stuff away to somewhere you can't reach (yet) generally doesn't solve the problem. At best, you're just discarding valuable, rare and limited raw materials. At worst, you somehow manage to fuck up an entire ecosystem.
But... the sun doesn't have an ecosystem...
(And no, I don't think it would be effective or economical either).
Are you sure? 'cause I'm pretty sure the light that reaches Earth comes from there, which makes it a pretty important part of our circle of life. It's very much within our ecosystem.
And before you claim that we can't possibly damage something that big with our junk; that's what people used to say about the ocean as well.
Somehow, it just doesn't seem like a good idea to throw your garbage into a nuclear reactor.
I don't see how launching garbage into the sun would hurt the sun......but launch would be out of the question, I think. What would the cost be for that?
The garbage would be destroyed LONG before it got even remotely close to the sun.
QuoteI don't see how launching garbage into the sun would hurt the sun......but launch would be out of the question, I think. What would the cost be for that?
Same as launching it to the moon, mars, or anywhere else I'd guess. Once you get outside earth's gravity it's mostly free flight.
The real cost factor is the millions of tons of garbage we have lying about, when every pound of material shot into space is carefully weighed and calculated whether or not we
really need it to go, because of the cost.
Also, I have no idea how it could hurt the sun either. Then again, we had no idea how it could hurt the ocean either, and there you go. It's probably harmless for quite a while. But I have no idea what happens if you send superheavy atoms that the Sun cannot handle into it. Probably nothing. Probably.
Quote from: "GurrenLagann"Is there even a real solution to the problems dealing with garbage?
If only we could launch it into the Sun. Yep, it's gonna happen...eventually....maybe.... :-$
Ever read
Bill The Galactic Hero? They tried that and made a sun go nova. :P
I've wondered if knuckle-heads ever woke up and started limiting conventional oil production maybe this type of technology would be feasible:
//http://www.plastic2oil.com/site/home
[youtube:1if7gpxw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPJXbWNUML4[/youtube:1if7gpxw]
It would place a price on waste plastic diverting it from landfills and possibly make it too expensive to be used for shit like shopping bags.