Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
1.1. Distribution of plastic objects into the Pacific Ocean
1.2. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch characteristic
1.3. The discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
2. Effects on wildlife
2.1. Characteristics of plastics
2.2. Plastic with marine birds and animals
3. Examples of reducing the plastic garbage
3.1. Clean up
3.2. Law toward solving plastic pollution
4. Recommendations
5. Conclusion
References
1. Introduction
Oceans make up seventy percent of earth's surface, and are the largest place to sustain and accumulate various species. However, humans' wastes, such as oil spill, industrial toxic wastewater, and garbage dumping, are becoming the killer to harm the oceanic ecosystem after rapid advancement of industrial and technological development. The most destructive is the plastic waste, which cannot be biodegraded, and becomes the most severe for the health of the oceanic ecosystem. The scientists have already begun to face this problem, and are trying to find a way to resolve it.
The purpose of this research paper is to present the characteristic of plastic pollution in Pacific Ocean. First, the report presents the causes of the great pacific garbage patch. Then, it demonstrates the effects on marine ecosystems and humans. Finally, it will make a recommendation of what humans can do to improve and save the Pacific Ocean.
2. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a giant plastic field in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. This section will discuss the ways of plastic debris enters into the Pacific Ocean, and present the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’s charact...
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Day, R. H. (1988). The Quantitative Distribution and Characteristic of Neuston Plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. Alaska: University of Alaska.
Gorman, S. (2009, Aug 4). Scientists study huge plastic patch in Pacific. Retrieved from Recters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5730ET20090804
Moorel, C. J. (n.d.). A comparison of plastic and plankton in the North Pacific central gyre. Retrieved from http://www.alguita.com/gyre.pdf
Owen, R. (2010, Jan 10). Welcome to the Gyre Cleanup Project. Retrieved from http://gyrecleanup.org/: http://gyrecleanup.org/
Sohn, E. (2009, Aug 29). Plastic in Oceans Leaches Chemicals. Retrieved from Discovery News: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/20/plastic-ocean-decompose.html
U.S. law. (2002, Janurary 24). Retrieved from Justia.com: http://law.justia.com/us/codes/title33/33usc1915.html
The North Pacific Gyre, home to the north pacific Garbage Patch, occupies the zone of the subtropical High between Haeaii and California. It is the largest and best studied of the gyress, though still fraught with unknowns. It is thought to be the trashiest, though this question is still being studied. Covering more than 20 million square miles, it is the largest on earth and therefor the planet’s largest garbage dumps. (Humes, 2012, p.
...omething inorganic to be able to survive. Usually, organisms eat other live animals or plants and not plastic. I believed this research is important because is a way to demonstrate and show to the public that plastic as trash is affecting our environment, and that this is why to recycle is important. If 10% - 13% of plankton is already the same amount of eggs laid on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I cannot imagine what would be the percentage in 10, 100, 5000 years. Some of the questions would be: How is it possible to determine how many eggs are in a specific area that is approximately the size of the United States? Why was not sample collected between the years of 1987 – 1999? Is there another organism that benefit from plastic other than sea skaters? Maintaining the planet Earth clean is important for the survival of not only humans, but every single organism.
Which means their obviously bad for the aquatic marine life environment & are cause many different forms of damage for them & us as one. On p.g. 23 of The New York Times upfront magazine “Birds,fish, sea turtles, & others are getting tangled in plastic bags or mistake them for food & choke”. Someone else might argue that they could the plastic bags in landfills instead of oceans. But that counter- argument is flawed because you’re just polluting by burning plastic which is bad on our part we’re not doing our part to support & taking care of the earth. Plastic in the ocean isn't just bad for plants & animals but for humans too because of the food chain some of us eat animals as a meat source such as aqua marine life like fish. If the fishermen catch fish that have been eating plastic then it's in our food supply if we eat that fish it's gonna be bad for us so many will end up getting sick from the plastic inside of the fish then what will we do our aqua marine food supply will go down the drain we couldn’t eat the fish since it's basically contaminated with plastic that we’re dumping there instead of trying to fix it & getting rid of plastic bags for good for the good of the earth. We’re causing damage towards the earth by dumping all that plastic into the ocean which damages our water supply it’ll poison us although we clean the water it depends on how big the plastic particles are, it’ll make us sick & sense it’s been lying in the oceans could bring in new pathogens &
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex, is a collection of litter which has ended up in oceans, seas and other large bodies of water. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans from the West Coast of America to Japan. These areas are linked together by the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone; this convergence zone acts as a highway for litter to move from one patch to another. It has also been theorised that the ocean floor beneath the Great pacific garbage patch is also littered with a lot of rubbish on its own. This is a valid theory because it has been proven by Oceanographers and Ecologists that 70% of marine debris actually sinks down to the ocean floor. Although the scientists have researched this garbage vortex, they did not find it. However, when the founder of this garbage vortex, Charles Moore, was boat racing, he found this garbage vortex while he was travelling from Hawaii to California. He and his crew members noticed that their ship was surrounded by millions of
Many people think that there is nothing special in cleaning of this rubbish, but in fact it’s not so easy as it sounds. Scientist have invented special instrument that will gather garbage, it is look like a net, but another problem has occurred. This problem is that many plastic pieces are the same size as little sea animals and special designed nets will catch not only debris, but a habitats of ocean too. Another barrier in saving of the ocean is its sizes. Even if people will invent the net which will only take trash, without fish or other animals, the scale of the ocean will make this job too long and time-wasting. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program has estimated that it would take 67 ships one year to clean up less than one percent of the North Pacific
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is sometimes referred to as the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex is a floating patch of garbage that has collected in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which is located in the middle of two high-pressure areas between Hawaii and California. The majority of the garbage, which is also called marine debris, in the patch is plastic, but items made from other materials such as glass and rubber are also present. Though the garbage patch is too large and goes too deep under the surface of the ocean for scientists to determine exactly how much garbage is in it, they have collected up to 750,000 bits of plastic one square kilometer (CITE). This sort of debris floating around in the ocean is dangerous for several reasons. One important reason is that marine animals mistake some of the garbage, especially plastics, for food (CITE). Another reason that the floating debris is so dangerous is because it can block sunlight from reaching deeper levels of the ocean, and thus, it removes the energy source for many autotrophs like alga...
As the studies detailing this new ecosystem are still in their infancy, it is difficult for people to speculate about the potential effects of the emerging plastisphere on marine ecological environments. Although we are seeing bad effects of this new ecosystem among larger marine animals, scientists who are studying this new ecosystem hypothesize that the plastisphere brings new opportunity to thriving smaller organisms. Whatever the case is, further studies are still essential to better understand the life created in a barge of plastic garbage in the ocean.
Every year, an estimated 8 million tons of plastic waste enters our environment, severely polluting oceans, beaches, forests, and even the towns and cities we live in. In the ocean alone, it is believed that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic pollutes the waters (“Plastic Statistics”, Ocean Crusaders).The majority of plastic pollution can be traced back to single-use items, such as grocery bags, bottles, and plastic packaging. According to United Nations Environment, “At the rate we are dumping items such as plastic bottles, bags and cups after a single use, by 2050 oceans will carry more plastic than fish…” (“UN Declares War on Ocean Plastic”, UN Environment). This pollution is a major problem and endangers not only the environment, but human
"An Ocean Of Trash." Scholastic Action 33.12 (2010): 16. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 31 Jan. 2014.
This pollution problem is so ubiquitous plastic can be found throughout the marine environment from coastlines to near shore lagoons to remote ocean hotspots where plastics caught up in marine currents. And gathered up into huge garbage patches that swirl
“Solutions to Plastic Pollution in our ocean” Natural Resources Defense Council. 3 March 2014. web 20 April 2014http://nrdc.org/oceans/plastic-ocean/default.asp
...ic and get ill from it. All this trash can kill the mammals in the ocean even if it’s just floating on top of the water. It’s still harmful to them and humans. It can kill, suffocate or poison the mammal. If humans decide to go swimming in the ocean and choke on a piece of plastic that breaks into pieces and they open there mouth for some reason and get trash in their mouth they can choke and maybe die. Just because people like to put their trash anywhere they please.
It is sad to say but humans have played their part in deteriorating the earth. We have polluted and killed the very thing that takes care of us. If you ride by any lake or river you find trash and debris around it. In the “The Call of the Wild” the author says that we have committed war against the earth by the dumping of poisons and explosives upon it (337). Unfortunately, plastics are the things that are doing the most harm to our environment. Plastics are convenient and we use them everyday and these are the things that we find in the oceans, rivers and lakes. They are harmful to the earth as well as human health by directly intoxicating us with lead, cadmium and mercury. Plastic debris laced with harmful chemicals are often found inside of our marine life and can poison them. Plastic can survive for thousands of years and many invasive species are found in them which can disrupt our habitats. We need to limit our consumption of plastics and make sure that they are disposed of in their proper places.
Research from the University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography said that species in the ocean consume a projected 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic every year in the Pacific Ocean (Nall, 2014). Pollution of recyclable materials in the oceans is one of the leading causes of why some marine species are nearing extinction. Many authors of articles and books analyzing this topic tend to agree that pollution of our oceans is a problem. The future of this problem is where their ideas tend to differ. The following four literature reviews attempt to demonstrate and support my belief that pollution is getting worse in the ocean and more marine life ecosystems are being affected, but there are things that we as humans can do
...harges of Human-made Debris Comprise the Largest Source of Marine Debris in Oceans World-wide (nearly 80%)." Plastic Debris Rivers to Sea Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.