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Our deep sea garbage dump
Our deep sea garbage dump: 18,000 hours of footage shows Pacific seafloor heaped in man-made trash
Seafloor along the west coast and all around the Hawaiian Islands is covered in refuse
A massive study of the Pacific Ocean floor shows it’s a huge underwater garbage dump.
On over 18,000 hours of footage from deep sea remotely operated vehicles, researchers at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) looked at seafloor as deep as 13,000 feet and found manmade trash items in every place they looked.
Deep sea vehicles viewed dive sites all along the West Coast from the Gulf of California to Vancouver Island and all around the Hawaiian Islands, with the worst accumulation of plastic, metal, fishing debris, and other trash in Monterey Canyon off the California coast.
Widespread: A trash bag is wrapped around a gorgonian coral at 7,000 feet off the coast of Oregon
Researchers found that Monterey Canyon, where MBARI conducts 200 research dives per year, had more trash than anywhere else.
In the deep sea ravine off the coast of California alone, the researchers noted over 1,150 pieces of debris on the seafloor.
Everywhere: A rockfish in a shoe. The study took place over the course of 22 years and found trash everywhere they looked on the sea floor along the West Coast and around the Hawaiian Islands
Mapped: Everywhere the along the West Coast and Hawaiian Islands the seafloor is littered with plastic, metal, and various other man-made trash
Abysmal: The researchers were surprised to find that the deeper they went, the more trash they found. Even as deep down as 13,000 feet
Researchers did not find random spatterings of trash all across the Pacific seafloor. Instead, they discovered that debris accumulates in deep sea slopes and rocky areas.
There was more garbage found in deeper areas than in more shallower spots.
Trash canyon: A tire rests 2,850 feet down in Monterey Canyon, the most trash-filled spot the study found
Not so refreshing: A Coke bottle keeps company with tiny starfish
Slimy deep: Researchers found more trash the deeper they dove, especially in rocky, sloping areas
‘I was surprised that we saw so much trash in deeper water. We don't usually think of our daily activities as affecting life two miles deep in the ocean.’ Said lead author of the study Kyra Schlining. ‘I'm sure that there's a lot more debris in the canyon that we're not seeing. A lot of it gets buried by underwater landslides and sediment movement. Some of it may also be carried into deeper water, farther down the canyon.’
Most of the debris, about a third of it, is plastic. Because there is no sunlight on the sea floor, these petroleum-based objects can take hundreds of years to degrade.
And as they do, they often turn brittle and break into tiny pieces. As this happens, it becomes more likely that tiny sea floor creatures will consume the toxic substances.
This can harm the animal and introduce foreign substances into the food chain.
[COLOR="#A9A9A9"]Mystery drum: A ghostly crab crawls along a 55-gallon drum cast to the bottom of the Monterrey Canyon off the coast of California. More trash was found in this deep sea ravine than anywhere else[/COLOR
Deep sea fishing: Fishing gear was also a common. Plastic was the most common type of object found
Paper or plastic: Metal was the second most common item type found. Of the plastic items, about half were plastic grocery bags
Of the plastic items, about half were plastic grocery bags. These increasingly controversial items can choke and smother animals.
Los Angeles became the biggest city in the country to ban free plastic bags in grocery stores following a city council vote this past Tuesday.
About $2 million a year is spent to clean up plastic bag litter in Los Angeles. Sanitation authorities estimate more than 228,000 bags are distributed in the city every hour.
But clearly many of the bags are ending up deep down on the sea floor.
Metal objects were the second most common. Of them, about two thirds were aluminum, steel, or tin cans.
Discarded fishing equipment was also commonly observed. As were glass bottles, papers, and cloth.
Big: A huge shipping container containing a thousand tires was found. Researchers believe such large items could seriously disrupt deep sea ecosystems
Batteries included: In addition to choking and suffocating creatures, some trash can contaminate the deep sea with caustic chemicals
MBARI researchers hope to do additional research to understand the long-term biological impacts of trash in the deep sea. Working with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, they are currently finishing up a detailed study of the effects of a particularly large piece of marine debris—a shipping container that fell off a ship in 2004.
Inside the container are over 1,000 steel-belted tires.
Researchers believe such a large item, to which many organisms have attached despite being in a habitat devoid of solid objects, can seriously disrupt a deep sea ecosystem.
Have a seat: A plastic chair sits ominously on the sea floor
Slow A cast off bag of potato chips. Plastic and metal, in the absence of llight, heat, and bacteria can take many years to degradeA cast off bag of potato chips
There is no way to cost-effectively remove the trash, so education about preventing further accumulation is a major goal of the project.
For now, though—or at least up until now—the problem has only worsened.
‘The most frustrating thing for me is that most of the material we saw—glass, metal, paper, plastic—could be recycled,’ said Schlining. ‘Ultimately, preventing the introduction of litter into the marine environment through increased public awareness remains the most efficient and cost-effective solution to this dilemma.’
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...man-trash.html
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