SEVENSEAS Marine Conservation & Travel Issue 10, March 2016 | Page 86

Perspectives on

Plastic Pollution in the North Atlantic

By Katie Jewett

Katie Jewett

hanley treaded water next to me, grinning. “Take a look at the bluest blue you’ll ever see,” she said, handing me her snorkel mask. I slipped it over my head,

and dropped my gaze below the water’s surface to witness the most mesmerizing shade of blue I had ever seen. Rays of sunshine filtered below in linear shafts and twinkled on and off from waves and clouds passing overhead, as if in greeting, before disappearing into the impenetrable depths. Blue went on and on. Swim call was soon over, but that moment will stay with me forever.

We were about 400 miles off of Bermuda en route to the Azores Islands sailing aboard the 72-foot vessel Sea Dragon. Captained by Eric Loss with Shanley McEntee as first mate and myself as watch officer, the vessel hosted sixteen shipmates in total—a mix of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, volunteers, and supporters—that were scouting the open sea for tiny plastic particles on behalf of an organization called The Ocean Cleanup.

Spearheaded by a twenty-one year-old entrepreneur, Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup is based in the Netherlands and is developing technologies to extract, prevent, and intercept plastic pollution in our oceans by initiating the largest cleanup in history. Instead of moving countless vessels through the oceans to collect plastic, Boyan captured global attention with his idea to have natural ocean currents do the bulk of the work. He and his team have developed floating barriers that use the ocean’s currents to capture plastic debris. Their feasibility study has indicated that a single, 100-kilometer long barrier could remove 42% of floating plastic in Great Pacific Garbage Patch in only ten years time.i

This particular expedition aboard Sea Dragon centered around collecting samples of microplastics (plastic fragments measuring less than five millimeters in size) in order to better understand how they move up and down in the water column as wind and wave conditions intensify. This data would inform the engineering team on how deep to design the floating boom structures in order to capture the greatest amount of plastic across the size spectrum. The area of study was the North Atlantic Gyre, a vast vortex of oceanic current that circulates in a clockwise fashion and, like a whirlpool, concentrates the majority of plastic in its geographic center.

Microplastics result from larger plastic pieces that enter the ocean environment, and, over time, break down into smaller fragments due to sunlight and heat. Because plastic is not biodegradable, these tiny pieces in our oceans will never completely disappear but instead only get smaller over time until eventually they enter the food chain at its most fundamental level: plankton.ii

Plankton are floating organisms that serve as the base of the food chain for the ocean environment, and the sub-type phytoplankton produce over half of the oxygen in our atmosphere.iii In short, they are critical to life on this planet, both on land and in the sea.

As plastics work their way up the food chain, they can leach toxic chemicals into marine life, including fish, birds, and marine mammals. For marine mammals and birds especially, larger plastic debris can become a lethal entanglement, disrupting their gastrointestinal tracts, and ultimately leading to death.

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