14 DAY TRIAL // Humans pollute the Earth and in the Pacific Ocean, between California and Japan, there is a lot of plastic trash floating around, but saying that this “Great Garbage Patch” is twice the size of Texas is highly exaggerated and completely unacceptable, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.
Other alarming theories say that there is more plastic than phytoplankton in the oceans, and the garbage patch has been growing tenfold every ten years, since the 1950s.
Angelicque “Angel” White, an assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State, was outraged by all these misleading affirmations, so she started her own investigation on the matter.
She said that “there is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists.
“We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole.
“Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”
A recent study carried out by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists, found that the amount of plastic in the Atlantic Ocean has not increased since the mid-1980s, in spite of a higher production and consumption of plastic materials, highlighted White.
“Are we doing a better job of preventing plastics from getting into the ocean?
“Is more plastic sinking out of the surface waters?
“Or is it being more efficiently broken down?
“We just don’t know,” said White, “but the data on hand simply do not suggest that ‘plastic patches’ have increased in size.
“This is certainly an unexpected conclusion, but it may in part reflect the high spatial and temporal variability of plastic concentrations in the ocean and the limited number of samples that have been collected.”
The oceanographer has leaned on most published literature and also took part at the one expedition that was aimed at understanding the abundance of plastic debris and the associated impact of plastic on microbial communities.
That mission was part of research funded by the National Science Foundation through C-MORE, the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education.
New and more accurate studies have shown that if you look at the actual area of the plastic itself, rather than the entire North Pacific subtropical gyre, the supposed “cohesive” plastic patch is actually less than 1% of the geographic size of Texas.
“The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial,” said White.
“But using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists produces a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size.”
A different approach consist in comparing the amount of plastic found to the amount of water in which it was found, the researcher added.
“If we were to filter the surface area of the ocean equivalent to a football field in waters having the highest concentration (of plastic) ever recorded,” she said, “the amount of plastic recovered would not even extend to the 1-inch line.”
Another thing that motivated White and her C-MORE colleagues to their analysis, was the relationship between microbes and plastic – they found during an expedition that photosynthetic microbes were thriving on many plastic particles.
“On one hand, these plastics may help remove toxins from the water,” said White.
“On the other hand, these same toxin-laden particles may be ingested by fish and seabirds.
“Plastic clearly does not belong in the ocean.”
According to her, the exaggeration within the media is harmful for the relationship between the public and the scientific community, since it could discredit scientific data.
There are growing efforts to remove plastic from the oceans but this operation will likely be expensive, inefficient and could also have unpredictable consequences, like an accidental removal of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and small surface-dwelling aquatic creatures, along with plastic particles.
“These small organisms are the heartbeat of the ocean,” White said.
“They are the foundation of healthy ocean food chains and immensely more abundant than plastic debris.”
To conclude, White said that the positive message in all this is that “the ‘garbage patch’ doesn’t seem to be as bad as advertised.”
However, since it's not an easy task to remove the plastic from the waters, humans should focus on “preventing more trash from fouling our oceans in the first place.”