A portrait of the unusual future of marine life [Life Finds a means]

This picture shows the hybridization of plastic garbage with marine life – algae and tiny invertebrates have made a home on plastic that has been floating within the North Atlantic for decades. Now scientists say the plastic is disappearing.

You have probably heard concerning the North Atlantic garbage patch, a region where discarded plastics and other garbage swirl around on the outside of the ocean, imperiling the wildlife who mistake it for plants and eat it. Scientists have found hundreds of starved birds and fish, who died with plastic in their bellies. But a new scientific study shows that the garbage gyre hasn’t gotten any bigger, despite existing for over 20 years. Where is each of the extra garbage going?

Researcher Kara Lavender Law and associates had been studying the gyre for decades, collecting scraps of plastic between 1986 and 2008, by towing nets along the ocean’s surface. They painstakingly counted particles of plastic by hand, seeking to determine whether the volume of garbage had changed over the years.

Their work is the subject of a study released today in Science. A release explains:

The amount of cloth, overall, failed to increase substantially during the last twenty years, the authors report. By combining their measurements with a computer model of ocean circulation, they show that the best concentrations of plastic occurred in a local where wind-driven surface currents were converging. This result helps explain why the debris accumulates in this particular region, to this point far from land. The authors propose a handful of possible explanations for why more discarded plastic isn’t appearing out within the open Atlantic Ocean. It can cut up into pieces too small to be collected by the nets, or it would be sinking beneath the skin. Or, it’d be consumed by marine organisms. More research shall be necessary to ascertain the possibility of each scenario.

In the picture above, it seems like it’s being consumed or as a minimum inhabited by marine organisms. Further evidence that if humans were wiped off the face of the planet, even our most offensive pollutants might eventually be overtaken by life again.

via Science Express

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This post is tagged: finds, Life, marine, means, portrait, Unusual