New
Atlantic island floats and is made of waste
plastic, paper and metal from ships and from the mainland
Even the Atlantic - as the Pacific Ocean - has its own floating landfill, where plastic reigns supreme. This was announced by Kara Lavender Law, oceanography of Sea Education Association, during the recent "Ocean Science Meeting" organized by the American Geophysical Union. "The Island of the waste is located in an area that roughly corresponds the Sargasso Sea, told the Lavender - where there are surface currents with a speed of less than two centimeters per second. Here, between 1986 and 2008, we collected about 64,000 pieces of plastic, which measure on average less than an inch and weighing less than 0.15 grams, in over 6,000 "caught" with special trawl-mesh " .
not yet clear, the size of this new ocean dumping, according to the American researcher, can be compared as a phenomenon and as concentration of plastic fragments (on average about 20,000 per square kilometer, with a peak of 200,000) than most famous and studied this in the Pacific. The Great patch of waste in the Pacific (Great Pacific Garbage Patch), whose size is estimated to be 700,000 sq km 15,000,000 square kilometers from about 0.41 to 8%, 1% of the ocean Pacific) was formed in the fifties and is continually fueled by the waste that comes to 20% from ships and oil platforms and 80% directly from the mainland . To "assemble" the North Pacific Gyre (Whirlpool North Pacific), a system composed of four ocean currents. The two huge landfills, the Atlantic and Pacific, are made primarily of plastic monofilament fibers and polymers by sinks areas up to about 10 meters deep. In fact, the ocean dumping may be many more. "Computer simulations - said Nikolai Maximenko University of Hawaii at the Ocean Science Meeting - report on two risk areas near South America, one in the vicinity of the second between Chile and Argentina and South Africa.
Unfortunately we do not have much news: both scientists and fishermen usually do not go to these areas because of poor productivity. " The trail of rubbish is translucent and is therefore not possible to locate the satellites. The only way to study it directly by boat. "The plastic - Said Roberto Danovaro, professor of the Department of Marine Sciences University Politecnica delle Marche - in addition to causing direct damage if swallowed in dolphins, turtles and other large animals, disruption of many marine organisms is ingested by filter feeders. " Hazardous compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls, can thus enter the food chain and from there to reach the man. "In the Mediterranean - Danovaro continues - the presence of plastic has fallen significantly in recent years, as well as that of tar and lead in marine organisms, thanks to regulations that govern the matter and the severity of environmental controls." Are being produced in the world, each year, about 250 million tons of plastic and less than 5% is recycled. The only way to decrease the size of ocean dumping, experts point out, is to increase the reuse of this material.
Roberto Furlani
April 1, 2010 ©
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