A seventh continent composed of waste

I came across this in Sahajsangham, the Francophone Sahaj group and resorted to a Google translation. It's not perfect but it gives the general idea. I also found the URL to the original article.

Enjoy and put attention on problem.

Bokwe

Translation: French » English
Thursday, 3 April 2008 (21h05):

A seventh continent composed of waste Saturday, 29 March 2008

In the North Pacific, ocean currents carry millions of tons of plastic. Their accumulation now covers an area six times as big as France. If Christopher Columbus took today Wednesday with his three caravels from Palos de la Frontera [on the Atlantic Coast of Andalusia] and crossed the Atlantic, it does not stop on the coast of the Americas, since has already discovered there are five hundred and sixteen years. He crossed the Panama Canal in search of India, its original destination. But that does not reach there because, midway, it would fall on a new continent.

This is the "Great plate waste in the Pacific", the "seventh continent", which is currently training between the coasts of Hawaii and North America, from millions of tons of plastic litter carried by the ocean currents. In this region of the globe, currents, turning it clockwise, create an endless spiral, a powerful vortex which swirl waste plastic as the wind does with paper bold in a corner of a place. The vortex, or subtropical gyre of the North Pacific, accumulating for years of plastic
waste from land or from navigation, resulting in its rotation, and the centripetal force, bringing towards its center, an area of low energy kinetics of 3.43 million square kilometers (one third of Europe and more than six times France).

There are already in this part of the ocean six tonnes of plastic a ton of plankton. The ratio between plastic and plankton is frightening, particularly as it is not just waste surface on most of its surface, the layer of plastic garbage this whirlwind reached a thickness up to 30 meters.

Not yet strong enough so that you walk over the formation of this "seventh continent" is not a recent problem, but it is not concerned that there are few. It represents an important area of the ocean, is a sparsely attended by shipping. There is no pleasure yachts, not exploitation by industrial fisheries, and there are only a few tiny islands here and there.

For ten years we assumed the existence of a high concentration of plastic in the area, and Greenpeace gave the warning on several occasions, but it was unclear the extent of the problem until an environmental organization on the west coast of USA, Algalita Marine Research Foundation (FDMA), publish these figures after a survey
conducted over the last ten years. We can not even walk on this huge cake of waste, as Jesus did on water, but the motion makes each day more compact. Its declassification in habitable land is not for tomorrow, but the Earth, or rather the ocean, will face a serious problem.

For now, according to figures confirmed by Greenpeace, there are in this region of the Pacific 3.3 million waste of any size for 1 square km of ocean. The total mass of this "continent" is estimated at 3.5 million tonnes, mostly plastic. According to calculations by the FDMA, the area of the plate of garbage has tripled between 1997 and today, and could be multiplied tenfold by 2030.

Litter that poison the whole food chain damage to marine life will soon be irreparable, warn experts. Indeed, plastics are not biodegradable (their average lifespan exceeds five hundred years) and, over time, they simply fall apart in pieces smaller and smaller without changing their molecular structure of one iota.

Thus warning of huge quantities of sand a kind of plastic, for animals, has all the appearances of food. These plastics, impossible to digest and difficult to remove, and accumulate in the stomachs of fish and seabirds, which eventually die from malnutrition. Moreover, these grains of plastic act as sponges, fixing many toxins in proportions millions of times higher than normal, such as DDT (

dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a pesticide) and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), extremely toxic products. The spillover effects can spread through the food chain and affect humans. Greenpeace has identified at least 267 marine species severely affected by this kind of poisoning.

This problem would have a solution, certainly worthy of the twelve labors of Hercules, but our production of plastics continues to grow at an exponential rate, and would require a radical change of habits. The technique of disposal of these plastics has been known for millennia: the trawl. The task could be entrusted to an important part of the
fishing fleet, which saw its fishery resources decline edging. But the recovery of millions of tons of plastic would cost several billion euros.

S. Basco in the ABC 25/03/2008