Continents of garbage adrift in oceans

As much as 10 per cent of plastics produced end up inside giant marine vortexes
Alex Roslin , Canwest News ServicePublished: Monday, November 17, 2008

Scientists are growing alarmed about massive floating dumps that are believed to be building up in centres of nearly all of the world's oceans.
The best-known patch, known by some as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, consists of an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic debris that has accumulated inside a circular vortex of currents known as the North Pacific gyre. Environmentalists call it the Pacific Trash Vortex.
It is estimated to be anywhere from 700,000 square kilometres -- an area larger than Alberta -- up to 15 million square kilometres (the size of two Australias), depending on how it is measured. Plastic from the vortex is increasingly washing up on Hawaiian atolls and being found in the guts of seabirds and fish.

An estimated 100,000 marine mammals die each year from eating or being entangled in debris -- mostly plastic -- in the North Pacific alone. Hence the vortex's other nickname: the Plastic Killing Fields.
Plastic in the sea doesn't biodegrade like other garbage. Instead, it slowly breaks up into tinier and tinier pieces that float on the ocean surface or sink to the sea bottom and can take years to reach the ocean gyres.
These vortexes are increasingly seen as environmental disaster zones. Plastic contains many toxic chemicals; it also soaks up other dangerous substances already present in the ocean, like carcinogenic PCBs and DDT.
Eighty per cent of the plastic in the ocean gyres is believed to come from the land, while the remainder is litter from cargo ships, cruise boats and other vessels.
Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at England's University of Plymouth, is one of the few scientists studying plastic in oceans.
In a 2004 study, Thompson found microscopic pieces of plastic in the water that had been scooped up with plankton samples in the North Atlantic starting in the 1960s, but there was four times as much plastic in recent samples, coinciding with a 25-fold increase in plastic production worldwide between 1960 and 2000.
Even more alarming, the water samples were from an area of the Atlantic north of Britain that isn't even in the gyre. No one has studied the amount of plastic in the Atlantic gyre itself.
Ocean currents and winds are slowly bringing debris -- estimated to be 10 per cent of the world's plastic production -- to the centre of five major ocean gyres in the North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific and the Indian Oceans, said Marieta Francis, executive director of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, based in Long Beach, Calif.
But despite the ever-growing plastic blobs in other oceans, the Pacific gyre is the only one that has been studied.
The Algalita foundation's founder, a yachter named Charles Moore, chanced upon the Pacific Garbage Patch during a 1997 boat race.
"Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic," he told the U.S. News and World Report.
The vortex was in the North Pacific gyre, where a high-pressure zone forces debris into a central area that has low currents and winds.

Moore returned with a scientific vessel to study the vortex and found up to 970,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some areas. That was triple the density found in a landmark 1988 study in the western Pacific by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That study found one area 1,000 kilometres east of Japan that had 315,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.
While much of the debris is large and conspicuous, most of it has disintegrated after years of washing around in the ocean.
The plastic pieces are usually five millimetres across or less -- about the width of a pea -- and must be scooped up in nets finer than a window screen.

It's not quite what people think. It's like a soup," said Algalita's Francis.
In the Atlantic, the only research on plastic garbage is more than 30 years old. A survey in the northeastern Atlantic in the early 1970s found 160,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some areas.
Back in Canada, the growing plastic vortexes still seem far from the official radar. At the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, oceanographer Denis Gilbert, one of Canada's leading experts on the Atlantic environment, said he'd never even heard about plastic accumulating in the Atlantic gyre.
"We have no one working on that," he said.

State unprepared for effects of warming, report says

Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Despite its tough goals to reduce greenhouse gases, California is not prepared to deal with the flooding, coastal erosion and loss of wildlife habitat that scientists are predicting in the coming decades as a result of higher global temperatures, a new report says.

Inundation of the coastal shoreline from accelerating sea-level rise and storm surges threaten property, recreational activities and wildlife enclaves, yet agencies are just starting to assess these climate risks and inform local communities, said a study released Monday by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit research group.
The report examines the state's capability to provide water and electricity to the public as well as protecting coastal resources, air quality, public health and ecosystems in response to climate change and extreme weather events such as wildfires. It is based on previous studies done by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Davis and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, among other researchers.
"We need to help agencies get prepared to deal with climate change," said Louise Bedsworth, a research fellow at the institute and co-author of the report. "In some areas, we need to be acting now."
Providers of water and electricity are the furthest along in responding to the projections for changing weather patterns in California, according to the report.
Water managers are beginning to plan for the warmer winters that are expected to bring more rainfall and less snow, dramatically reducing - perhaps by half - the Sierra snowpack.
The mountain ice has provided free water storage that gets cities and farms through the dry summer months and supplies salmon and other wildlife with fresh water. Now water agencies are using tools of conservation, recycling water, desalination and groundwater banking.
Electricity providers are preparing for peak use in the summer months, particularly in inland areas, the report said. They are encouraging energy-efficient construction and lighting, and alerting customers to cut back during the peaks.
In recent years, water agency managers have become increasingly aware of how climate change will affect their agencies and consumers, said Peter Gleick, executive director of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research center in Oakland.
"But there's a big difference between awareness and action. I don't think enough is being done on the ground to reduce the vulnerability of our water supplies," Gleick said.
Scientists project that sea level could rise between 8 and 16 inches by mid-century, but efforts to control flooding are lagging, the report said. Flood managers haven't started to change land-use plans to ward off possible devastating floods, particularly in fast-growing parts of the Central Valley, the report added.
The state is also behind in protecting coastal resources, the report said. The California Coastal Commission and Bay Conservation and Development Commission have been urging communities and agencies to incorporate sea-level rise into development plans but the measures are in infancy stages, the report said.
In March, the BCDC is hosting an international symposium with Holland to tap into that nation's hundreds of years experience in dealing with rising seas and compare research on problems and solutions, said BCDC Executive Director Will Travis.
California's preparation to protect wildlife from climate change is also inadequate, the report said. As temperatures rise, plants and animals will begin to try to shift to cooler, higher elevations.
If conservation of habitat doesn't take climate into account, the wrong lands could be protected, the report said. The federal government has resisted considering climate change as a threat under the Endangered Species Act.
What happens in California is key, the report said, because other states and even nations have been looking to California for regulatory and technical ways to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
California law requires an 80 percent reduction of carbon emissions below 1990 levels by 2050. The state Air Resources Board next month will release its latest plan on reductions from improved energy efficiency in buildings, increased renewable energy sources and more fuel-efficient vehicles.
After President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January, the federal government is expected to grant waivers to the states to allow tougher regulations on greenhouses gases. California has been hampered by lawsuits from the auto industry, which has spent millions of dollars fighting state laws requiring cuts in tailpipe carbon emissions, a change that improves fuel efficiency.
On Monday, California Attorney General Jerry Brown, along with his counterparts in other states, sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urging a requirement in any proposed auto industry bailout measure to include provisions to combat global warming. The states want automakers to drop their opposition to California's greenhouse gas emission standards and produce energy-efficient vehicles that cut emissions by 30 percent by 2016.
The Public Policy Institute of California's study was paid for in part with funds from the Nature Conservancy, PG&E and Next Ten, a business group.
Read the report online
View "Preparing California for a Changing Climate" at links.sfgate.com/ZFJX.
E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/18/BAPT146BFJ.DTL&feed=rss.news

Slow progress on ocean protection

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website



Less than 1% of the world's oceans have been given protected status, according to a major survey.
Governments have committed to a target of protecting 10% by 2012, which the authors of the new report say there is no chance of meeting.
Protecting ecologically important areas can help fish stocks to regenerate, and benefit the tourism industry.
The survey was led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and is published in the journal Conservation Letters.
"For those of us working in the issue full-time it's not a surprise, we've known all along that marine protection is lagging behind what's happening on land, but it's nice to have it pinned down," said TNC's Mark Spalding.
"It's depressing that we've still got so far to go, but there are points of hope," he told BBC News.

Coastal concentration
Four years ago, signatories to the UN's biodiversity convention - which includes almost every country - pledged to protect at least 10% of the oceans in a way that makes sense ecologically
Protecting them does not mean banning activities such as fishing or shipping completely, but making sure they are carried out sustainably.
All of the areas currently protected fall into countries' Exclusive Economic Zones, and the majority are along coasts, the study finds.
Even so, only about 4% of coastal waters are protected.
Countries diverge widely in how much protection they have mandated.
Whereas New Zealand has almost 70% of its coastline under some form of protection, countries around the Mediterranean have set aside less than 2%.
In the developing world, Dr Spalding cites Guinea-Bissau as a country that has had invested in protection, particularly in the Bijagos Archipelago, which is home to a community of hippos dwelling along its mangrove coast, as well as more conventional marine species.
Palau, Indonesia, Micronesia and several Caribbean states are also making significant progress, he said.
About 12% of the Earth's land surface has been put under protection.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Marine Protected areas

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Oceans/Healthy_Oceans/Marine_Conservation/
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a key tool to help protect ecosystems from the effects of industrial activity. They can protect exploited species during critical stages of their life, reduce secondary impacts of fishing, such as habitat degradation brought about by trawl fisheries, and act as “insurance” against poor and inadequate management. By their simplest definition, marine protected areas are areas of ocean that are free from destructive forms of resource exploitation.
Not only can marine protected areas protect sedentary species such as shellfish, reef fish and rockfish, they can also help protect migratory species such as salmon and cod through the protection of key spawning and rearing grounds and migration corridors.
MPAs have been shown to increase the density of organisms within their boundaries, increase the average size of organisms, and increase the numbers of many exploited species. One benefit of MPAs is to return the protected ecosystem to its pre-exploited state, providing a baseline by which to judge the effectiveness of management in surrounding areas.
One of the greatest attractions of marine protected areas from a fisheries perspective is their ability to enhance fish populations outside of the reserve. Spillover into areas adjacent to MPAs can be expected to occur if the density and size of organisms increases within established reserves.
MPAs can also be important scientific tools, by providing information about the structure of unexploited ecosystems and how they compare to their exploited analogues.
MPAs are not, however a panacea for damaged marine ecosystems. An oil spill does not have the good sense to turn away at the boundary of a marine reserve. Protection of habitat outside of reserves, control of industrial activity and reforms to fishing practices are essential complements to the establishment of reserves.
Despite increasing evidence of the success of the management technique, less than one 10,000th of the world’s oceans are fully protected in MPAs, and Canada has protected less than 0.1 per cent of its oceans. Some countries, however, have come further than most. The New Zealand parliament has announced its intent to protect 10 per cent of its coastline in MPAs before 2010, while Australia has announced a plan to create the world’s largest marine reserve. Canada is off to a slow start.
The successful establishment of MPAs that are scientifically sound and provide maximum benefit requires good science and a well structured, transparent planning process based on the principles of ecosystem-based management. While Canada is committed to these planning measures in the Oceans Act and Oceans Strategy, it has not developed or funded them.
Join us in urging Canada’s government to adequately fund ecosystem-based oceans planning to protect our common heritage while allowing Canadians to make a living from our oceans.

Wild Salmon

Wild Pacific salmon – the Spirit of B.C.

Wild Pacific salmon are inextricably woven into the culture and the economy of the West Coast. Few images are as evocative as the salmon in full spawning colours. They’re icons in our art, our cuisine and storytelling. The salmon fishery was a founding industry of what would become the province of British Columbia. Long before that, salmon was a key resource for Aboriginal people – one that was treated with reverence. Every First Nation kept the custom of returning all the bones of the first salmon caught to the river. Respect for the Salmon Spirit ensured abundance of food and the fish’s perpetual return.
The relationship between these extraordinary fish and humans dates to the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Since that time, Pacific salmon have evolved into more than 9,600 distinct populations and live in nearly every Canadian watershed that drains into the Pacific Ocean.
Today, the wild Pacific salmon fishery is worth $184.4 million a year and is an important part of the economy for many coastal communities. Salmon is eaten fresh, smoked or canned in B.C., across Canada and around the world.
But wild Pacific salmon are in trouble. The West Coast of Vancouver Island once boasted 1,200 stocks. Now, some 718 -- more than half -- are extinct, at moderate risk of extinction or considered stocks of special concern. Province-wide, at least 142 salmon populations have vanished forever. If salmon are to survive in the wild, they need help.
The David Suzuki Foundation is working to conserve Pacific salmon
The Foundation is committed to the conservation and protection of wild Pacific salmon and their habitats. We are currently working with government, industry and other conservation organizations to improve habitat protection and fisheries management.

What you can do to help salmon
Join with the Foundation in convincing the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to take action to preserve our wild salmon stocks. Ask them to take these three simple steps:
1. Stop paving over salmon streams and overfishing (preserve habitat and improve fisheries management).2. Start taking global warming into account in salmon-protection plans.3. Go out in the field to enforce the laws protecting salmon (renew the will to enforce the Fisheries Act and other legislation that would halt the destruction of salmon habitat and over-exploitation of the resource).
Other ways to help include:
Make waves. Send an
e-mail to the Fisheries Minister and ask the Canadian government to provide more resources for implementation of the Pacific Wild Salmon Policy.Work with local governments and encourage them to pass bylaws that protect our “Salmon Neighbourhoods”. Check out our municipal salmon handbook: Zoned RS-1 (Residential Salmon).

SALMONOPOLIS – helping salmon where they live
The David Suzuki Foundation has developed http://www.salmonopolis.ca/, a web tool designed to support education, capacity building and advocacy resources for people who want to help salmon where they live.
Salmonopolis.ca is also a Crime Stoppers for fish. The site has a “Report-a-Violation” section that allows citizens to make habitat-damage reports, contact lists to help them connect with and support local stream-stewardship groups, and an “Ask-an-Expert” feature where an appropriate scientist or policy expert posts answers to visitors' questions. Check it out.

www.davidsuzuki.org

Ocean Acidity Rising at Surprising Pace

Jessica Marshall, Discovery News

Nov. 25, 2008 -- Measurements of ocean acidification in the U.S. Pacific Northwest show acidity is rising more than ten times faster than climate models have predicted.
The researchers can't yet say how widespread this trend is. But as the waters acidified over the eight years the team measured, the numbers of barnacles, mussels and algae inhabiting the area also changed.
Ocean acidity rises as sea water absorbs more carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from power plants and automobiles. Lead author Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago did not intend to measure the effects of ocean acidification when he installed his ocean monitor in the waters near Tatoosh Island off the northwest tip of Washington state in 2000.
But as global concern over ocean acidification grew, "I realized we'd been sitting on all this data that we could use to determine whether it was happening," Wootton said. His instruments recorded changes in pH -- a measure of acidity that lowers as acidity rises.

"The expectation was that the pH would change so slowly that it would be hard to see a change. Almost to our surprise we found the signal that it was going on," Wootton said. "We were sort of surprised to find in general just how much it was changing over time."
From there, Wooton looked at his biological observations to try to assess how much these pH changes matter to the ecosystem of the area. His team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He found certain species that would be expected to be the most pH-sensitive did indeed show the worst performance. These included mussels and certain barnacles -- large species with calcified shells. Scientists believe acidification interferes with the formation of such shells.
But the trend was not entirely predictable.
The acorn barnacle increased in abundance, along with several types of noncalciferous algae. Wootton suggests that the acorn barnacle may also suffer from low pH conditions, but not as much as the other types of barnacles, which normally outcompete it. With the other species taking a bigger hit, the acorn barnacle can move in.
Another possibility, Wootten added, is that these species are easy prey for shelled predators like snails, which may also be less abundant in a more acidic environment.

Such complicated interactions would not have emerged from studies of individual organisms, said Christopher Harley of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, "That's the stroke of genius of this paper."
"I think the ecological observations are quite important, also for future projections," agreed Peter Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., who was not involved in the study. "For example, the study indicates which species may be most affected in a low-pH/high-CO2 world."
But how does Wootton explain why his measured pH changes are so much larger than what models have predicted?
"That's something that, frankly, is a big mystery and presumably will spark some thought or explanation of what might be going on," said Brewer.
Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa pointed out that Wootten's study was on a coastal site, not in the open ocean, so "one needs to be cautious about extrapolating the pH findings to other locations."
The part of the ocean that Wootton studied also experiences a great deal of upwelling, so it's not completely suprising to find changes in acidity. But, Brewer said, "I think the changes are bigger than we expected."
The unexpected scale of the pH changes suggest that scientists may be in for more surprises as global warming continues to alter ocean environments.
"If I look at how the wider scale of impacts may occur," Brewer added, "it is clear that we are in for big changes that are not yet well understood."

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/11/25/ocean-acidity.html

Chemicals Entering Coastal Waters: Freshwater And Saltwater Interactions In Coastal Groundwater

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2005) —
Scientists have recently recognized an imbalance in the flow of salty groundwater into the coastal ocean: considerable saltwater discharge into the ocean has been observed, but little or no return flow has been seen. Now it appears that the timing of the discharge may be key to the health of our coastal waters.New measurements and models suggest that seasonal changes in the water table may provide clues to how water is exchanged and why the largest discharge occurs during the summer, when the coastal ocean may be most vulnerable to the dissolved chemicals in the groundwater because biological activity is at its highest and river inflow at its lowest.
Fresh and salty groundwater flows into coastal waters as submarine groundwater discharge and is an important source of nutrients, contaminants and trace elements to the coastal ocean. Recent research has revealed that a large portion of submarine groundwater discharge is saline water. Although this water was once ocean water, the mechanism controlling its flow into and out of the sediments has not been previously determined. Using seepage meters and geochemical tracers, scientists have directly measured and inferred groundwater flow from land to sea. But they have not previously been able to observe the opposite, large-scale flow or intrusion of seawater into coastal aquifers to balance this exchange.
In a paper published August 25, 2005 in Nature, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) made both direct and indirect measurements of flows back and forth at Waquoit Bay, Massachusetts at various seasons of the year and compared those results with a general model of a coastal groundwater system. Their findings reveal a lag in the inflows and outflows related to seasonal changes in the water table.
Study co-author Ann Mulligan of the WHOI Marine Policy Center says seawater is drawn into aquifers as the freshwater-saltwater interface or boundary moves landward during winter. The water discharges back into coastal waters as the boundary moves seaward in summer. Since summer is typically associated with higher temperatures and evaporation, saltwater should intrude inland rather than discharge at the coast. However, the numerical model reveals that there may be a time lag of several months between precipitation, groundwater recharge, and associated impacts on saltwater flowing into or out of the aquifer.
“We looked at several mechanisms other than seasonal exchange that could drive saltwater circulation, including tides, wave run-up on the beach, and entrainment or trapping of saltwater into fresh,” Mulligan said. “ But each of these flows balanced over a tidal cycle and occurs in a well-defined relatively small area, and could not account for the large discharge we observed during summer in Waquoit Bay.“
The study was conducted at the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Falmouth, Massachusetts and supported by the National Science Foundation.
The authors say the global extent of seasonal exchange of freshwater and saltwater is unknown but could be an important factor in transporting nutrients and contaminants trapped in sediments into coastal waters. Because the chemistry of coastal waters is affected, it is important to understand the link between the seasonal hydrologic cycle on land and the saline groundwater system in coastal aquifers. Now that a major driving mechanism of saline water flow has been determined, important follow-up studies will look at the chemical content of the inflowing and outflowing water over a yearly cycle. Most previous studies have looked at chemical loading from groundwater over short time-periods, but this study shows that a major process is occurring on a yearly cycle.
“The impact on coastal chemistry could be enormous,” Mulligan says. “Along the U.S. east coast the greatest saltwater discharge may occur in summer, when biological activity is at its highest and river inflow at its lowest. The input of nutrients at certain times of the year may be key to the health of our coastal waters.”