Algalita Marine Research Blog

Noontime position: 30 30.06 North, 60 22.23 West

Three days, twenty-six trawls, countless pieces of plastic, and fourteen hundred miles till we reach the Azores. Though we added 4 new crewmembers in Bermuda - an increase in bodies and decrease in personal space – the additional 3 artists, filmmaker, and veteran sailor Joel Paschal are all adjusting to the unusual routine of boat life. Bursts of activity – trawling, cleaning, cooking, sailing – followed by long bouts of waiting. Staring out to sea. And catching regular sun and moon rises – here’s Stiv greeting the day with his best Titanic rendition...

Since leaving Bermuda, our trawls have looked nearly identical to those we collected on our first leg – clumps of Sargassum peppered with small particles of plastic – whites, blues, grays, and the occasional pastel. Which gives staring out to sea a bittersweet tone – in this seemingly pristine landscape, impossibly clear waters stretching thousands of miles in all directions, our random samples all contain plastic.We’re still on track with our goal of conducting a mega transect – sampling at least once every hundred miles, but the weather continues to be our wild card. After 3 dreamlike days, high winds now force us to slow down - we can’t get beyond our 100-mile limit between trawls unless we absolutely have to.

Built for speed, this slow pace is torture for the Sea Dragon. At 10-15 knots, she slices through the water gracefully, an aquatic gazelle. At our trawling speed of 2-4 knots however, she plods and heaves heavily, engine growling, stray lines clanging in protest.But we have no choice but to wait – the heavier winds churn the sea surface, pushing plastic beneath the range of our trawl. So we’ll continue to pass the hours, meditate on the seascape, entertain one another, and await the next weather forecast.

Jan. 28 “Plastic Ring” 

We end our first day at sea after an unbelievable 10 days in Bermuda. The island in now a distant glow on the horizon as we put the research trawl back in the water. We slow the sailboat down to 2 knots and trawl for 3 hours, skimming the surface for whatever floats. At 1:30am we pull in the net. Among the shredded plastic film, nurdles, and random pieces of plastic confetti, we’ve also nabbed a milk jug ring.

In our lectures we often talk about the impact of plastic pollution on wildlife. There is a snapping turtle named “Mae West”. When she was a hatchling she walked into a milk jug ring. As she grew she could not break this corset around her waist. Now she’s as big as a football, but with a thin waist, looking more like an hourglass. Her spine has never healed.

This is an example of two key problems to the plastic pollution issue. First, that milk jug ring is a product made to last forever, yet designed to be thrown away. Throw away plastic products, which do not biodegrade, are quickly littering our world.

Second, of the millions of products made in plastic, only a handful have a reasonable plan for recovery. Two companies, Naked Juice and Earthbound Farms, take back all of their plastic containers and will truthfully recycle them back into the original product. But millions of other products made from plastic have no post-consumer plan, so you find them on roadsides, filling landfills, washed up on beaches, and floating out to sea. WE MUST IMPROVE RECOVERY. And please remember, recovery doesn’t begin at sea. The 5 sub-tropical gyres in the world cannot be cleaned, but we can end the Throw Away culture of plastic consumption on, and improve recovery of everything else.

Jan. 29 “Not a Plastic Bag”

“Don’t touch the tentacles!” Joel warned everyone.  We’ve got a Portuguese Man of War in the net.  It has beautiful colors in shades of blue, a translucent balloon with a pink stripe across the top.  We’re seeing plenty of wildlife.  Just an hour ago two crew members spotted three whales.  Both whales and jellyfish are susceptible to ingestion and entanglement by plastic.  Baleen whales are filter feeders, and the tentacles of jellies tangle anything in their way. Anna just saw the fluke of another whale.  We’ve now been at sea for 24 hours.  A third of the crew has been sick.  We’ve completed three trawls.  And at this moment there’s still daylight while we travel 8 knots under sail power alone.

At 10:00 yeserrday morning, on our final day of preparations before setting sail for the Azores, a truck arrived at the harbor delivering two entire palettes of food from Butterfield and Vallis- the leading food supplier in Bermuda - all donated, a gift to our expedition! Steve looked on wide eyed as massive amounts of meats, cheeses, canned goods, breads, and more were piled in our carts and loaded on the boat. “We’ve got enough food to sail around the world!

Later that morning, Jim Butterfield himself paid us a visit, and we experienced first hand his tremendous generosity.

“I watch plastic trash accumulate here in our local waters”, he mentioned, and told us about watching mini-garbage patches form right here in the harbor. An avid sailor and environmentalist, Jim has also spent time on the high seas, observing the same plastic that washes up on Bermuda beaches. When our new friend Jennifer Gray mentioned our budgetary concern with provisioning a boat for 13 people, he made an offer we couldn’t refuse:

“Come to the warehouse, give us your wish list, and anything we can’t supply, we’ll buy for you at the local supermarket”.

Francois met us at the warehouse, and spent a patient hour going over our culinary Christmas list. His only concern was supplying small amounts, “I can’t give you 2 tins of tomato sauce, but I could give you a case, will that do?”

We’re incredibly grateful for the support and kindness we’ve been shown in Bermuda, and though all are anxious to get back to boat life, we’re not in a hurry to leave the Island. Our ten days of school visits, beach cleanups, guided tours of the incinerator and recycling center, and dinner parties wrapped up tonight with a final feast at the Hog Penny – where yet another supporter Jay Nichols treated 15 of us to a last supper on stable ground.

We must give tremendous thanks to a few other people that made our stay in Bermuda enjoyable and very rewarding. Judith Landsburg and our new friends at Greenrock were always at the ready to help with our needs. Judy Clee, Bermuda’s premiere beachcomber, showed us around the island, and a visit to the Aquarium to get answers to our fish questions from local experts. The folks at Keep Bermuda Beautiful and the recycling center welcomed us with tremendous smiles and eagerly took charge of meticulous measures of plastic waste on Bermuda shores. And JP Skinner at BIOS- his patience, good spirit, knowledge and passion defines what an educator should be.

We leave Bermuda with a strong desire to return. When we do, we will have plenty of information to share about our research, and knowledge that the people of Bermuda are at the ready to take the helm to conserve and protect our shared oceans.

Some of the 5 Gyres crew went for an unassuming hike on a West Bermuda Beach. What did we find...?

Two dozen Bermudan High School teens combed Coopers Beach despite 20 knot winds and horizontal rain. “Look at the broken pieces along the high-tide line,” JP Skinner yelled over the roar of wind. JP directs the public school programs for the Bermuda Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (BIOS). Half of the kids are climbing through the high tide line pulling nets, buckets, shredded bottles and a vacuum cleaner out of the trees. In half an hour JP and the kids create a pile of trash as tall as me.

Bermuda is an island in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre. We’ve been here for 4 days, working with groups like “Greenrock” and “Keep Bermuda Beautiful” to clean beaches and lecture about what we know about plastic. My growing impression of Bermuda is its likeness to Hawaii. Both are in the path of their respective gyre currents – North Pacific Gyre vs. North Atlantic Gyre. Both carry a burden of trash from the shores of other nations. The trash even looks the same. Nurdles are everywhere. Bottles are full of bitemarks. And plastic confetti of colored and degraded fragments litter the wrack line.

Do these clean-up efforts work? A storm is fast approaching and I can see a barnacle-covered milk crate in the surf. Where did it come from? If we pick up this one, how long till the next one arrives? It’s great to see the students getting out of the classroom to experience nature. They feel good about cleaning up this junk. That is certainly meaningful, but does the clean-up effort make a difference? I don’t think so.

I think about solutions often. Of all the plastic pollution I’ve seen in the world, on beaches, floating out to sea, piles of it burning in developing countries, bags stuck in trees or littering roadsides, what I don’t see are those plastic products that have post-consumer value. I don’t see very many plastic bottles on the streets of Los Angeles where I live, because it’s worth a nickel to 8 cents at a recovery center. But recovery centers don’t take much else.

What if all plastic waste had value? Imagine a per-pound recovery program that gave kids a buck for every pound of plastic waste they brought in, as it is for most metals? Let’s bring back the “School Paper Drive”, but for plastic. If citizens could return mixed plastic to recovery centers for a significant monetary return, then I’m certain we would see people conducting their own beach clean-ups. You wouldn’t see plastic bags in trees or plastic on roadsides. You might even see those gyre clean-up efforts actually make a few dollars by going out to sea.

The plastic industry claims its all recycleable, but unfortunately it’s not recoverable. You can’t do anything with it if you don’t have it. Voluntary recovery programs account for a small percent of the plastic we produce – less than 4%. An economic incentive to collect mixed plastic waste would work. The plastics industry could make this happen. Here’s how it works. You collect all of your plastic, all of your packaging, disposables, broken buckets, old toys, all that useless plastic stuff. Clean it, dry it, and take it to a recovery center for $ per pound. The plastics industry then deals with the material they created. It would work.

We landed in Bermuda on Sunday, just ahead of the gale force winds that hit 24 hours later. After 9 days at sea, without news, cell phones, internet, we were all deeply saddened to hear the news about Haiti – a jolt of perspective after being single mindedly focused on plastic marine pollution.

The sight of land after days of the endless seascape is always a welcome change - Bermuda particularly so. Gliding in on a serene, still Sunday, we were all silenced by the beauty of this oasis in the middle of the Atlantic. Clusters of pastel colored, stucco houses nestled on rocky outcrops, crystal clear turquoise waters, powdery white beaches tinted pink from corals - we all wondered why we haven’t heard more about Bermuda. A secret well kept by East Coasters?

We’ve been here for 5 busy days thus far, taking part in a number of educational activities organized by our tireless host Judith Landsberg, who runs local environmental charity Greenrock and is good friends with Ron and Portia from Pangaea. Thanks to Judith, we’ve been to three Beach Surveys, toured the local incinerator, will be giving a public talk tonight, speaking tomorrow at BIOS the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, meeting tomorrow evening with the US Ambassador at the Consulate, touring a local recycling center, and speaking at a school. And then, a good 48 hours to enjoy our “honeymoon suite”, kindly provided by BIOS!

Monday morning, we joined our first cleanup at John Smith beach. Crewmember Stiv Wilson, Editor in chief of Wend magazine and rarely at a loss for words, struggled to describe the scene. “This is....unbelievable”. The array of plastic trash littering this otherwise idyllic white sand beach was so plentiful and varied that we were able to make this mosaic here from trash collected in half an hour. (2 PHOTOs- MAKING MOSAIC AND FINAL PRODUT)

On our second beach cleanup- a similar scene - we found one remarkable piece of plastic: a wad of plastic film/sheeting, with a colony of corals, Foraminifera, growing on top. Nature has a wonderful way of adapting that will hopefully supercede our efforts to destroy her...

Little or none of this trash originates in Bermuda – rather this is trash from the mainland, carried some 700 miles by the Gulf Stream, and dumped on distant shores. Frequent beach cleanups by Keep Bermuda Beautiful serve as a temporary fix and a wonderful community effort, but more plastic simply washes up the next day. This serves as a sobering reminder that the problem starts on land – and on land is where solutions must begin. We can’t sieve, net, vacuum, or cleanup all the plastic on the world’s oceans and beaches, we must move further upstream to where the problem begins.

We’ll be blogging much more frequently from now on – so stand by for a recount of our visit to Nonsuch Island and a nearby shipwreck, and our tour of Bermuda’s incinerator – where all Island Garbage is burned in a waste to energy model.

Clear skies cede to gray clouds, howling winds, and boiling seas. And with it, our ideal trawling conditions come to a temporary halt. Crew stumble around the galley grabbing onto handholds for support, while poorly stowed pots and pans rattle until someone gets the hint. Now, we don foul weather gear on our night watches – life jackets and “deadliest catch” sea suits, harnessed at all times to the boats safety lines.

We’re reminded of Ron’s parting words – “Remember, the ocean is not your friend. Respect and enjoy her, but never forget she can turn on you....”

Just as suddenly, she turns again – the seas settle to a gentle ripple and we resume our trawling. “The calm before the storm” remarked Stiv. How right he is...A spectacular double rainbow stretches across the horizon. We reel in trawl #11 – to find the by now predictable handful of Sargassum, a few pelagic crabs, a dozen halibates (like a water skeeter, the only marine insect) and the ubiquitous plastic fragments we’ve come here to research. Though we’ve found plastic in every trawl, the pieces have been tiny, and few – nothing like the density we’ve seen in the Pacific.

And then we came across our first windrow – a series of counter currents that create a slick line of debris on the oceans surface. “A plastic bottle! No...it’s a BOOT!” Bobbing amongst a patchy line of Sargassum was a large rubber boot, covered with barnacles and algae. As our skipper Clive shifted gears to backtrack, we began spotting more and more plastic trash. “A bottle cap, another bottle cap! A roller blade wheel!” Marcus stood at the bow shouting directions to Clive, while we dashed from port to starboard with our modified pool skimmer, netting as much as we could. 45 minutes later, we’d collected some 17 bottle caps, a shotgun shell, a plastic roller ball from a deodorant stick, numerous plastic chips, several plastic milk jug rings, and finally – the boot.

After 45 minutes of conditions calm enough to explore the windrow, the winds regrouped, and we’re now slamming along over fairly rough seas – too rough unfortunately to trawl. We’re hoping for another break in the weather, to gather a few final samples before racing to Bermuda to beat a nasty storm on the horizon. Ultimately, our schedule means little – as the ocean has plans of her own. We’re pretty sure none of these plans involve choking on our plastic trash.

http://5gyres.org/whats_happening_now

Three days into our expedition. Blue skies, light winds, and relatively calm seas. We’re motoring along at 2 knots, painstakingly slow for a sailor, but perfect speed for collecting surface samples of plastic pollution. So far we’ve collected five – every one contained plastic fragments, film, line, and pre-production pellets. Small quantities, and small particles, but present nonetheless.

We left the St. Thomas yacht harbor on Friday afternoon, after several days of prepping, stowing, running errands, and squeezing in last emails while the rest of the crew arrived- nine total. Besides Marcus and me, there is Ivan Martinetti from BlueTurtle our title sponsor; Jon Howard- “JT” from Ecousable also sponsors of JUNKraft and JUNKride; Leslie Moyer, an activist and supporter from San Francisco; Stiv Wilson, CEO and editor of Wend Magazine and a phenomenal chef; Steve Amato-Salvatierra, the Sea Dragon’s intern, fresh out of high school and sailing around the world before college; and our skipper and first mate from the UK- Clive Crosby and John Wright, both exceptional sailors and exceptionally patient men.

Already, the busy yacht harbor bustling with tourists and horizon-blocking cruise liners seems far away – our only view now is 360 degrees of Caribbean blue.

After the first evenings wave of seasickness bouts – from mild nausea to hanging over the side of the boat – we’re now settling into a routine: sleep, cook, trawl, eat, clean, trawl, sleep, trawl, scan horizon for debris, trawl. Our goal is to collect at least 25 samples by the time we reach Bermuda in 8 days, and another 25 as we continue on, crossing the Atlantic to the Azores.

We pulled up trawl #1 on Saturday morning, as an eager crew clustered around the manta trawl, flip and digital cameras in hand. “Did you find anything?” asked Jon, always ready to film. After thoroughly rinsing and tossing a few handfuls of Sargassum (link to wiki/other description of Sargassum) we found a few tablespoons of planktonic organisms flecked with small plastic particles.

What at first appears a scant amount compared to our Pacific trawls is still reason to reflect: in this vast ocean, several hundred miles from the predicted accumulation zone, using a relatively tiny device – we’re finding evidence of plastic. This short clip shows how we conduct our sampling.

Other notable trawl findings: a small, translucent jelly with a chip of blue plastic in its body – an example of organisms interacting with debris; a large sheet of plastic packaging, a small piece of plastic film, two fishing floats, one plastic crate, and a partridge in a...

In four days, we hope to reach the center of the Sargasso Sea, where the plastic accumulation zone is predicted to be. Meantime, spirits are high, crew is fueled by our mission, and were constantly reminded of the tremendous support it took to get here.

Captain Moore spoke on Maine’s Public Radio this week after being on Colbert Nation Tuesday 1/6/10 and presenting at the MERI Ocean Environment Lecture Series in Maine on 1/8/10.

The Captain has a full dance card while traveling up and down the east coast lecturing. He will be at it again on 1/11 at the Beacon Academy Lecture Series. On January 12th, he will present at the Marine Science Center at Northeastern University Nahant, Massachusetts. Last, but not least, the Captain will be at UNCWilmington presenting in the Lumina Theatre, Student Fisher Center on the university campus. A scientific poster session will pregame his lecture. All are free and open to the public so go and find yourself a seat!

If you can’t make it, you could go to 5gyres.org and learn more about this issue. It’s Algalita and Marcus Erikson’s latest initiative. It’s loaded with info and is a very cool site. Marcus and Anna – you rock!