Algalita Marine Research Blog

(Above: Plastic Reef first stage)

On our recent voyage to The Atlantic Gyre, The Sea Dragon's crew consisted of not only scientists, journalists and activists, but artists as well.  We were privileged to take Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde whose work with plastic is downright astonishing. Not only is Eynde an exceptionally talented artist, he's a dedicated environmentalist and a capable sailor. In college, Maarten became increasingly unhappy with the state of environmental affairs in the world and sought to build a body of work that would inform the future with positivity.

Instead of losing his mind and falling into despair over the challenges that face us as a world, Maarten developed a forward looking body of work that look at society's artifacts of now in a future perspective.  One of his latest projects which ultimately led him to cross the Atlantic with the 5 Gyres crew, is called Plastic Reef.  Maarten plans to build a ten by forty meter artificial reef system installation out of found marine plastic debris.  This is what he collected on his journey aboard Sea Dragon.  Startling, hunh? Note the objects in the photos that will give you a sense of scale.  It was great having you aboard Maarten! 

 

 

Latitude: 22 03.3 South, Longitude:91 10.9 East

With a name as beautiful as Imani, none of us quite believed we were really nearing a tropical cyclone. Nor were our weather reports conclusive – a weather fax from a Belgian crew stated “nothing to worry about”. And a wildly different report from a French ship warned of an impending hurricane.

Better safe than sorry is always the rule of thumb, so we detoured North, making a wide arc around the possible weather. The crew sprung into batten down the hatches” mode, taking down sails, putting up the small storm sail, stowing away all loose gear, and stringing up a network of thick safety lines around the entire boat. The seas continue to build unmistakably.

"Lets go watch from the bow!" Marcus and I step outside. We're immediately enveloped in a thick sauna of warm, wet air. Thankful for the safety lines, we grab ahold, clip our harnesses on, and slip slide our way to the front rails. Mountains of water, deep valleys, and howling winds replace yesterdays gentle blue tapestry. The crew now wear their waterproof foul weather gear. Less prepared, we're soaked in a matter of minutes.

Just the other month, we found ourselves sailing through hurricane conditions in the North Atlantic. Our second hurricane, in another gyre! No one is concerned, least of all our Captain. Our detour will put us far from danger, but we will be in for a ride.

22°31.39S, 91°39.93E

"Hey, there's a turtle stuck in a ball of net" someone yelled from the top of the mast, the best place to be for a 360° view of the world for miles. From 150ft up in the air came a barrage of sightings: a shark, two turtles, random large fragments of plastic floating by and one enormous ball of tangled fishing nets and rope. We're in the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch.

An oceanic garbage patch is an area of relatively dense accumulation of debris, not an island, but a thin soup that's more concentrated in the 5 subtropical gyres than surrounding waters. Other than the behemoth net ball, or trails of random debris forming wind rows, you usually will see very little with the naked eye. You detect an oceanic garbage patch when you trawl.

We've conducted 6 trawls in the last 7 days, each one with plastic debris. Trawls 1-4 had a visible fragment or two floating about. A Trawl 5 had a dozen, and trawl 6 had twice more than all others combined.

So if you hold the idea that the solution to the plastic pollution problem is to go to any of the 5 gyres and get it, you're wasting your time and money. The plastic out here will likely photo degrade and break apart into smaller and smaller fragments. After cycling through untold numbers of marine organisms through filter-feeding or food mimicry, the particles will likely sink to the seafloor, either as fish poop or become encrusted by colonizing critters. They will take their polymer chains and absorbed pollutants to the sequestering grave of deep sea mud.

Solutions to plastic pollution begin on land.

When the 5 Gyres team made it to the Azores after our North Atlantic marine debris investigation we took the opportunity to see who on the Faial (the island where we landed) worked on ocean issues and if anyone was working on plastic.  This led us to give a presentation at the University of The Azores where we met researcher, Marcos Santos. Marcos works on tracking sea turtles and he's noted in the necropsies he's done on juvenile sea turtles that many have lots of plastic in their guts.  Santos says that juveniles will eat anything looking for a meal, while adults are more particular.  

As a member of the 5 Gyres team back from an expedition to the Atlantic I'm no stranger to the horrendous fact that plastic is ending up in the marine food chain. What's really scary is that plastic works like a sponge for chemicals in the ocean--- and bad ones too-- PCBs, DDT, flame retardants, etc. But so far, I only have firsthand experience with plastic in fish. But this morning, one of my brothers in arms from the Connecticut Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation posted the above picture and this description:

"This Saturday we purchased steamers from a large, retail grocer. They were local, wild harvested. While eating one I felt something strange - I spit it out and found what turned out to be a small styrofoam ball. Assuming it was a simple mistake we continued to eat but being more careful. In the end, we found 6 clams with these styrofoam balls. At first we thought it was from shipping but upon further review these balls were in various parts of the steamers and could only get there through ingestion."

And here is what they pulled out of the clams:

This is amazing. Also long. Take a moment when you have time.

This is perhaps the best infographic/animated short on the impact of bottled water on our environment both 

from water resource angle and a plastic pollution angle. Very nice work Ms. Leonard.

24°29.25S, 98°06.39E

I was dreaming that I was sitting at a board meeting for the Algalita Foundation when suddenly someone walked into the dream-office and said “Do you want to trawl now?” Half asleep, I responded “What? Yes. Huh?” She asked again, “We can trawl now at night so you can maybe catch some fish.”  It’s 4:30am and Anna and I are zombies on deck staggering about with the manta trawl.  The crew of the 250ft. tall ship “Stad Amsterdam” are eager to see what we will find next.  “We’re only going 3 knots, so we can trawl as long as you like,” Christiana says.

Anna’s got the trawl log in hand, jotting down the starting time and latitude/longitude. I’m wearing the harness and locked into the side of the ship as we open the side gate, hang overboard with the trawl, and throw it in.

“We are approaching 5 knots,” the officer on deck says.  Moments before sunrise, we pull the trawl back onboard.  The cod end (that’s the removable sock on the end of the net) has a dozen 4-8 centimeter-long fish, like flying fish and myctophids.  We’re still far from the accumulation zone of the Indian Ocean Gyre, but there are plastic fragments here as well.

I’m reminded again that our connected oceans are a plastic soup with varying surface densities of plastic pollution.  We expected to find very little here, yet here it is. There are many people with good intentions that want to solve the problem of plastic pollution by going first to the ocean.  It is extremely impractical to start here. It must happen upstream, in the hands of those that create plastic, make plastic goods, and the customers that use them.  We need better systems for collection and containment of waste, better products with less packaging and better materials, and plastic itself should no longer be used for throw-away products.   Knowing that plastic is an environmental hazard, we must end the “Throw-Away” culture that created this mess in the first place.

Noontime position: 24 25.510 South, 99 28.891 East

A few days ago we had our first climbing lesson, to learn to scale one of the tall ships vertigo-inducing masts. 

Meanwhile, our boat is also climbing - UP the ocean. In fact, on this trip so far, we’ve already descended around 30 feet, and are now beginning to climb again, another 100 to go before reaching Mauritius. How is that possible? I wondered - isn’t sea level a more or less constant height around the world – i.e. zero?

Meet Bert Vermeersen one of the chief scientists on board, taking extremely accurate, vertical GPS measurements on sea level height. Which is apparently quite difficult to do. Bert found Marcus and me on deck early morning, struggling to do some sit ups while the boat rocked and rolled about. We quickly abandoned this exercise in futility, and chatted with Bert instead.

“Believe it or not, sea level can actually vary by as much as 300 feet around the world” Bert explained, “depending on the relative depth of the ocean, the force of gravity, and differences in topography. The earth is a flattened elipse rather than a spherical globe – equator to equator the earth is 20 miles longer than at the poles. These differences in sea level height are measured with respect to the ellipsoid.”

And so, although the indigo blue expanse surrounding us looks perfectly flat, we are slowly, gradually inching our way up a marine mountain, at a pace so slow that only Bert’s high tech measurements will notice the change.

Climbing the mast on the other hand – this is a change noticeable enough to send my heart rate soaring! After a basic safety 101 from one of the deck hands, we donned our harnesses and scampered up the mast, as we’ve been watching the crew do enviously for days. The view from atop is breathtaking. This is now a daily must!

AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT HIGH SPEED TRAWL CONTINUES

For the last few days, a group of around 10 eager men, lead by Marcus and Haico, have been wrenching, bolting, testing, and retesting a space age looking steel-torpedo device, rigged with an underwater camera and a long net. I stand with Redmond O’Hanlon – the resident author on board, and watch the male tool circus unfold. He chuckles and says to me, “if you young ladies ever need to attract a man, all you need to do is drag out a wrecked car engine, leave some tools lying around, and wait for them to swarm.”

The idea was to create a high-speed trawl, with a camera that would capture footage along the way. The first try had the contraption bouncing and diving along the surface like a lovable robotic dolphin. The footage was mesmerizing – a crystalline underwater seascape – but the device still spins wildly.

And so Marcus is back in the workshop, welding another prototype. We all wait anxiously.

Still, we’ve had a chance to trawl twice so far – both times yielding a trawl full of Portuguese Man O War (ouch!) and one or two plastic fragments. We’re still far from the accumulation zone.

25°15.91S,104°53.52E

There are still 2,000 miles and two weeks between us and Mauritius, with the Indian Ocean Gyre between us. We’re working with another scientist from the University of Hawaii, Nikolai Maximenko, who has developed a computer model which predicts where plastic pollution might collect in the world’s oceans.

To create his model he took information from 12,000 drift buoys, which have already been tracked around the world. He added what is known about currents and wind to the equation. On his map of the world, he released hypothetical drift buoys evenly across every point in the sea. Amazingly, the drift buoys migrated to the 5 gyres.

We’re using the Maximenko model to plan our route through the 5 gyres. We’ve already been through the North Pacific Gyre and North Atlantic Gyre. After 500 miles in the Indian Ocean Gyre, we’ve conducted two trawls. We found plastic in each one.