Plastic debris is clogging the oceans

Pollution is now as dense in the northernmost ocean as it is in the Atlantic and Pacific.

From an Article by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic Monthly, April 20, 2017

The Arctic Ocean is small, shallow, and—most importantly—shrouded. Unlike the other large oceans of the world, it is closely hemmed in by Asia, Europe, and North America, with very few watery entrances in and out. Some oceanographers call it the “Arctic Mediterranean Sea,” a nod both to its between-the-terra-ness and its similarity to that smaller ocean.

Often, that remoteness has played to its ecological advantage. Very few ships pass through the area (with all their attendant pollution and environmental disruption), at least compared to nearby waterways like the Bering Sea. It also helps that much of the Arctic freezes over every winter.

But a paper released this week in Science Advances argues that its location is now harming it. The first survey of the region has found that roughly 300 billion pieces of floating plastic, most of them tiny but visible to the unaided eye, have clogged the planet’s northernmost sea. The plastic, having been carried to the pole over decades, now has very few ways out.

In other words, the Arctic Ocean has become the Northern Hemisphere’s “dead end” for floating plastic.

“Our data demonstrate that the marine plastic pollution has reached a global scale after only a few decades using plastic materials,” said Andrés Cózar Cabañas, a biologist at the University of Cádiz. It is, he said, “a clear evidence of the human capacity to change our planet. This plastic accumulation is likely to grow further.”

The survey was carried out while the research vessel Tara circumnavigated the pole in late 2013. The same Tara cruise also surveilled local plankton populations and observed the aurora.

It found a couple key differences in how plastic pollution works in the Arctic. To the south, in the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, plastic tends to accumulate in enormous subtropical “trash patches.” While these are not the dense and churning gyres of garbage that many people imagine, they can be accurately described as parts of the ocean with a lot of garbage in them. In a way, they’re like the asteroid belt, an otherwise void place in the world-ocean where plastic is much more likely to accumulate.

The Arctic does not so much have trash patches inside it; it is giant trash patch. The Arctic Ocean has about the same median density of plastic as the Atlantic and Pacific do. But unlike in the southern oceans, where plastic has unevenly congregated in certain areas, it has spread itself throughout the entirety of the Arctic.

Sometimes, though, it is quite dense: In the seas north of Iceland and western Russia, there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic per square kilometer.

Martha Buckley, an oceanographer at George Mason University, agrees with the authors that plastic is not coming from the Arctic itself. This is “intuitive,” she writes: Few people live around that ocean’s coast, there is little ship traffic there, and most of the plastic is tiny enough that it seems to have spent several years in the ocean. (The paper’s authors estimate that it takes one to three years for plastic from the North Atlantic to make it to the Arctic.)

“It is pretty clear that this plastic has been transported by ocean currents. How the plastics are entering the Arctic is not as clear,” she told me in an email. The paper, for instance, doesn’t discuss transport through the ocean’s vertical currents. Over the last few years, research has suggested that gyres in the subtropics and subpolar regions are linked by deeper currents.

Ocean currents matter because they’ll help researchers learn if the plastic is trapped in the Arctic permanently or whether it will eventually work its way out. Other scientists are still trying to come up with solutions to the world’s long-term plastic problem. In the meantime, says Cabañas, the only way to fix the problem is to mitigate its scale. Countries and coastal communities should work harder to keep plastic from winding up in the ocean.

“We should properly manage the plastic waste at its source,” he told me. “Once the plastic enters the ocean, its destination and impacts are uncontrollable.”

Blow Hole named "Dragon's Mouth in Arctic Region of Russia over 70 yards wide. See Part 3 tomorrow.

CLIMATE CHANGE: The Giant Methane Monster Is Lurking, Part 2

From an Article by Thom Hartmann, EcoWatch.com, July 7, 2014

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Center have found that Arctic methane is leaking out from the ocean floor nearly twice as fast as was previously thought. The researchers found that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is releasing at least 17 million tons of methane into the atmosphere each year.

Natalia Shakhova, one of the lead researchers on the study, said methane releases from the Arctic seafloor are, “now on par with the methane being released from the arctic tundra, which is considered to be one of the major sources of methane in the Northern Hemisphere.”

To put this in perspective, just seven years ago, estimates suggested that only 500,000 tons of methane were being released into Earth’s atmosphere each year. Now we’re measuring 17 million tons of it. Just in the Arctic.

Now, we can’t directly stop Arctic sea ice from melting and releasing methane into the atmosphere, but we can help stop what’s contributing to that melting in the first place: fossil fuel extraction and usage.

Every day, the fossil fuel industry extracts more and more fossil fuels from the ground, releasing tons and tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That carbon dioxide warms our atmosphere, which hastens the melting of Arctic sea ice, and the release of even more dangerous methane into our atmosphere.

We need to be keeping the remaining methane right where it is, buried deep under a thick sheet of ice. And a great way to accomplish that goal is by introducing a carbon tax.

Putting a price on the amount of carbon that the fossil fuel industry takes out of the ground would encourage less fossil fuel extraction, and more reliance on clean and green energy. With a carbon tax, fossil fuels would become more expensive than renewables.

For every day that America’s fossil fuel industry pumps carbon pollution into our skies, our environment is deteriorating quicker, more and more Arctic sea ice is melting, and climate change and global warming are speeding up.

We have a chance right now to keep the giant methane monster that’s lurking under the Arctic Ocean right where it is, and save our planet in the process.

The time for a carbon tax in America is now!