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Items reveal a lot about ocean currents
Published November 13, 2009
Last spring my wife and I went camping on Matagorda Beach near Port O’Conner. It was only months since Hurricane Ike had hit and we were in awe of all the debris on the beach. On our way home, we were listening to National Public Radio when they interviewed oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.
Ebbesmeyer has a new book called “Flotsametrics and the Floating World.” For many years, he has been studying the junk that floats and travels on our oceans and has learned a tremendous amount about ocean currents. The interviewer asked Ebbesmeyer which beach in the world has the most washed-up trash. He answered without hesitation: Matagorda Beach on the Texas Coast.
Fascinated by this topic, I read his book and this summer was lucky enough to hear him speak in Astoria, Ore. Ebbesmeyer is based out of Seattle and his interest in using flotsam to measure ocean movement started in the early 1990s when a cargo ship lost containers containing 78,932 Nike tennis shoes. When these shoes started showing up on the Pacific Northwest coast, it became a news item.
Ebbesmeyer knew he could learn about currents if he could find out where the containers washed overboard. He learned these accidental loses are very common — with hundreds of containers likely lost each year without being reported. He had to do some detective work, but did find out where it happened.
It seems that using floating objects to learn about the sea and send messages is an idea going back hundreds of years. Ebbesmeyer has been able to map the currents, or gyres, that circle the various oceans of the world. These major currents spawn smaller gyres and eddies that work in conjunction as a dynamic clockwork affecting life and weather on Earth. There are many questions as to how the Arctic and Antarctic gyres will be affected by the rapidly increasing speed of ice melt because of global climate change and how this change will affect other gyres in contact with them.
Ebbesmeyer discusses the incredible amount of plastic trash filling our oceans, constantly degrading into smaller particles. Plastic and other trash now form huge garbage patches in all our major oceans. As the plastic breaks into smaller particles, it mimics the food of the various sea creatures and they feed on it. This occurs throughout the entire food chain.
For example, an albatross chick was found dead with more than 500 pieces of plastic in its stomach. We’ve all heard of the sea turtles dying after eating trash bags mistaken for jellyfish.
A more insidious potential danger is the hormone-mimicking chemicals used in some plastics, such as polychlorinated biphenyls that have been tied to a large number of sexual organ deformities and low fertility in sea mammals and other wildlife. These chemicals concentrate as they work up the food chain. The killer whales in Puget Sound, in the Pacific Northwest, have the largest PCB concentrations of any vertebrates.
Like with so many other environmental problems, the question is whether humanity will have the wherewithal to make the tough decisions to clean up our oceans. Of course, we might not have a choice.
Jim Harrison is an amateur naturalist, fisherman and birder, a member of the Board of the Friends of Brazoria Wildlife Refuges and a frequent volunteer at the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory.
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