My favourite Forum Newsgirl?!
I should probably be turning the news off and going to bed.
My favourite Forum Newsgirl?!
Five dead in Pennsylvania shooting:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/15/us/pennsylvania-shootings/index.html
Who the heck is throwing all this crap in the oceans?
Nearly 300,000 Tons of Plastic is Floating in the World's Oceans
By Katherine Tweed
December 12, 2014 | 9:05 am
Plastic seems to be everywhere in our lives and, according to new research, it has also become a ubiquitous part of the world's oceans.
An international team of scientists joined forces to survey the expansive array of plastic items found afloat in the seas. What they found was everything from buoys and bags to polystyrene pieces and microplastics, totaling about 268,940 tons. The figure does not even include plastic that washes up on beaches and seashores, floats in the water column, or sinks down to the seabed.
Many researchers, journalists, and photographers have documented the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other waste islands, as well as the increasing amounts of microplastics in the water. But the weight and abundance of global ocean plastic pollution has been hard to quantify, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere.
"There's a vast amount of this stuff in a place it doesn't belong," Kara Lavender Law, principal investigator with Plastics at SEA, told VICE News.
The irony of petroleum-based plastics is they were designed to be long lasting but are now the de facto choice of disposable packaging. Every year, 280 million tons of plastic is produced, according to the nonprofit Algalita, a marine research institute.
'You are what you eat and what you eat is coming from an environment with trash floating in it.'
About half of the plastic produced makes its way to the landfill and less than 10 percent is recycled, according to the 5 Gyres Institute, a non-profit that works to eliminate plastic pollution. Some items are durable goods that are used for the long-term. But the rest finds its way into the environment as pollution — often ending up in the water.
The group of ocean researchers took 24 expeditions in international waters, costal regions, and enclosed seas, such as the Mediterranean, scouring the surface with nets or making visual estimates of the number and weight of plastic objects in the water. They then made models to estimate the total amount of plastic in the oceans. Their findings, which provide a baseline for future research, were published December 10 in PLOS ONE.
Although large items make up more of the weight of ocean trash, it is microplastics that truly plague the oceans. Microplastics, defined as 0.33 to 4.75 millimeters, comprised about 92 percent of the more than five trillion particles estimated in the study.
Model results for global count density in four size classes. Model prediction of global count density (pieces per square kilometer; see colorbar) for each of four size classes (0.33-1.00 mm, 1.01-4.75 mm, 4.76-200 mm, and >200 mm).
No part of the world's waters have been spared, but the North Pacific is the worst affected by plastic pollution. The North Pacific has a little more than a third of the total plastic found in the oceans. The PLOS ONE study's findings were similar to a previous study that found the total microplastic load of just the North Pacific was about 35,000 tons.
"That's encouraging that two very different approaches are coming up with a very similar number," Law told VICE News.
The figures are conservative, Captain Charles Moore, one of the paper's coauthors and founder of Algalita, told VICE News. For large floating debris, each piece was estimated to be about a third of an ounce. But Moore said about 90 percent of the pieces he's weighed for other studies was "way more" than that — and sometimes more than a pound. The modeling also took conservative estimates of the amount of plastic waste from urban areas that washes into the ocean.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the study found the Indian Ocean has more pieces of plastic than the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans combined. What surprised the authors in this study was there is nearly as much total plastic in the Southern Hemisphere as there is in the Northern Hemisphere, even though there are far more sources of plastic pollution in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere, which includes many rapidly developing nations, like Indonesia, are quickly catching up, said Moore.
But there is far less data for the Southern Hemisphere, and so the findings from this study should be interpreted with caution, said Law.
Model results for global weight density in four size classes. Model prediction of global weight density (pieces per square kilometer; see colorbar) for each of four size classes (0.33-1.00 mm, 1.01-4.75 mm, 4.76-200 mm, and >200 mm). The majority of global weight is from the largest size class.
Researchers know that larger pieces of plastic are broken down into increasingly smaller and smaller pieces. Some is broken down through UV degradation. Other plastic undergoes biodegradation, a process where microorganisms break down the chemicals that make up the plastic. But more often it is marine life - from fish to birds to mammals — that ingests the plastic trash that is everywhere.
For years consumers have been warned about specific plastic items harming charismatic ocean mammals, such as turtles, being caught in the plastic rings that hold six packs of soda or beer. But now researchers know that everything from small invertebrates to large predators are ingesting plastic. And scientists are increasingly asking how much of it is not just impacting aquatic life but also the seafood that finds its way to our plates.
"You are what you eat and what you eat is coming from an environment with trash floating in it," said Law. She cautioned that there is still a lot of research that needs to be done to better understand how plastics might transfer to animal tissue that animals eat. There is also research to better understand how plastics absorb other contaminants in the ocean, such as DDT, and whether that can transfer to the organisms that eat the plastic.
"There's a natural reason to be concerned," Law told VICE News.
Cruise ships legally dump massive amounts of shit into the oceans. Read more here.
So far, global estimates have only looked at the trash on the surface and not the total amount suspended in water or sitting on the bottom. Many types of plastic are certainly further down, either because they break down on the ocean's surface or because many types of plastic resins don't float at all. Moore told VICE News about one third of fish his expeditions have surveyed have ingested plastic.
To curb the amount of plastic that makes its way into the ocean, Moore said those that produce the plastic, half of which goes to packaging, need to be responsible for it.
"So, if you can't imagine vacuuming the planet from Tierra del Fuego to Northern Canada, just think: Cleaning the ocean would be much more difficult," Moore told VICE News. "Society needs to make things that don't require cleanup."
https://news.vice.com/article/nearly-300000-tons-of-plastic-is-floating-in-the-worlds-oceans
I've posted 4 videos Here that relate to this subject...
Who the heck is throwing all this crap in the oceans?
That is terrible. We humans are sometimes worse than animals.Stuff gets washed into sewers, but honestly from what I have seen in my worldly travels. Most of the word does not give a shit about litter. You see people just walking down the street, the open a candy bar and drop the rapper on the ground. Bits of rubbish everywhere mixed with dirt and dust.
One pretty extreme example was in Myanmar (Burma) at this beautiful tropical beach. Ngapali Beach. Beautiful long curved beach white white sand lined with big palm trees. Then down one end there was a little stream a bit of coral out cropping sticking out and not far past that there was basically dividing line in the sand where the local fishing village started. Lots of fishing boats and stuff. However the beach was insanely polluted. Rubbish everywhere. Not just plastics, but rusty cans, light bulbs and all sorts of shit. You walk in from the beach and yeah just sand and stuff mixed with bits of rubbish.
That is terrible. We humans are sometimes worse than animals.
Australia Has a Night Sky You’ve Never Seen
Indigenous Australia is the longest living continuous culture on earth. Despite this, modern researchers have just started to look at the wisdom that comes with 50,000 years of residency, and that's especially true of astronomy. First Australians tracked and predicted interstellar movements in highly sophisticated ways, looking up at the night with eyes intriguingly different to our own. To hear some examples, I met with Swinburne University's Dr Alan Duffy who specialises in indigenous astronomy.
Astrophysicist Dr Alan Duffy in his Swinburne office. Image by David Allegretti
It's an unusually cold summer afternoon in Melbourne when I meet the 31-year-old astrophysicist. I start by asking about the evidence for pre-European astronomy.
"There are stone arrangements all over Australia which accurately align with known astronomical directions called cardinal points," says Alan. Most interesting is the accuracy with which they're placed. Alan says this indicates that First Australians recognised celestial cycles over decades, and aligned the stones in a surprisingly accurate way. "I was shocked to learn this too," he says enthusiastically. "And I'm supposed to know a little about astronomy. I mean, I don't think most people these days could point out east or west — we've become so used to having GPS and phones."
He pulls up another photo on his laptop and explains the way Indigenous Australians imagined their constellations. While westerners make out shapes from stars and bright points, kind of like a join-the-dots puzzle, indigenous Australians saw pictures in the dark areas as well. Alan points to an image on the screen as an example. It's a smudgy brown nebula with a line of black running down the middle. In that black line Aboriginal people saw an emu, while to western astronomy most of the arrangement is called the Coalsack Nebula. "So you end up with the same sky seen in a completely different way."
He goes on to describe how for Aboriginals, there was a also practical aspect to their constellations. The Emu was only visible in late April and early May, which is also when emus lay their eggs. "So in essence it was a calendar; a guide for dinner time, to go out and get this incredibly valuable protein."
The Magellanic Clouds. Notice the shape of the river with the small smudges to the right. Image via NASA.
Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that indigenous Australians managed to seamlessly weave social lessons into their astronomy stories. Alan points to a star cluster called the Magellanic Clouds, which is a fog of nearby galaxies. There are stars grouped around a black streak, which forms something like the shape of a river. Then, away from the main group, are two smaller sets of stars. People in Arnhem Land see this arrangement as campfires along a river, while the stars further away are an elderly couple who were too frail to complete the journey.
"So the young people actually come across and look after the elderly. Every time you looked up at the night sky you'd be reminded of your duties as a society – look after the old," says Alan with a smile.
The same stars but from an Australian perspective - Djulpan. Image via Professor Ray Norris
Next he points to the Orion constellation on his laptop monitor. He explains that when seen from an Australian vantage point, Orion is upside down, so the Yolngu people of northeastern Arnhem Land saw three brothers and a canoe. They called this Djulpan,which is a prominent Aboriginal story.
One day, three brothers decided to go fishing against the advice of their elders. It was storm season and far too dangerous. The three brothers ignored the warning and went anyway. They found themselves sitting in a canoe for hours catching nothing but kingfish, which is a problem as it's the totemic animal for their tribe. To eat it would be akin to cannibalism.
Eventually one of the brothers cracked and ate one causing Walu, the Sun Woman, to become furious. Walu took the storm clouds and turned them into a whirlwind which lifted the boat up and cast the brothers into the sky where they remain today.
This story is an excellent example of the moral lessons engrained in astronomy storytelling. There's both a lesson about keeping sacred law, and paying heed to the words of elders. Not only that, but there's also a practical application. Djulpan is only visible from February to March, which is when the Monsoon begins. That tells you it's no longer safe to go out and fish.
The Pleiades Cluster. Image via NASA, Palomar Observatory
Finally, bringing up an image of the Pleiades cluster, Alan explains his favourite quirk of indigenous astronomy. "In a lot of cultures this is called the seven sisters," he says. "They lie just below Orion the Hunter so as the night sky wheels over, the seven sisters are fleeing from Orion." He then goes on to tell me there are similar stories of a hunter or fishermen pursuing seven women in Australia too, originating at a time when there was no contact between the Greeks and the Aborigines. "So the idea is that we told this story around campfires in Africa, and in the last 40,000 years we've been telling that same story as we spread out across the earth, which I absolutely love and I'm willing to buy into."
As we finish up, the conversation takes on a more sombre tone. Looking up at the stars on a clear night sky is a beautiful and humbling experience, and it seems Alan shares this sentiment. The issue is that we're losing our stars to light pollution, and this means we're also losing some of mankind's oldest stories. Alan ruminates on this for a moment. "I think if everyone turned the lights off so they could see what they're missing, I don't think we'd turn the lights back on. And if we did, maybe we wouldn't turn on as many."
http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/australia-has-a-night-sky-youve-never-seen
That is terrible. We humans are sometimes worse than animals.
We are animals, though. We're just lucky that the rest of the animal kingdom aren't as careless of their environment as we are. We are by far the most destructive creatures around.
Actually, you kind of freaked me out. I want to LIVE!Well to be fair, animals and life through out it's history on the earth has shaped the environment a lot. We're just doing things on a speed up and large scale.
There is no balance in nature and plants and animals all have been negatively affecting each other and the environment for as long as they have been around.
Even going back to the most basic life, over 2 billions years ago cyanobacteria terraformed the planet. The earth had something like a purple to orange sky and green oceans. There was very little oxygen in the atmosphere and the oceans had massive amounts of iron with in them. The cyanobacteria through photosynthesis released oxygen from the oceans into the sky. This rusted out the iron which fell to the bottom and caused the iron ore deposits we mine today. With out the oxygen in the atmosphere, life as we know it would have never come about.
Pretty cool to think about.