The world's deepest ocean trenches are packed with pollution | Hacker News Reader

The world's deepest ocean trenches are packed with pollution

economist.com

220 pointsrglovejoy83 comments

I hope that the global conversation on ecological protection can evolve from climate change to tangible effects, like pollution and ocean acidification, just as climate change evolved from the use of the term global warming.

Ocean acidification in particular ought to be an issue even climate skeptics can acknowledge is a problem. Unlike climate change, which can be difficult to communicate due to its abstract nature (we had heat last summer and snow last winter so what's changing?), you can plainly test acidification with two cups of water - tap and sparkling - and a pair of litmus slips to show the difference. Then expand on how all the carbon in the atmosphere does that to the oceans, and then demonstrate what that does to life in the oceans, from the algae and plankton to the fish people eat.

Overall I think that focusing on precise tangible issues that people can observe for themselves is a better way to communicate the need for ecological protection than to be completely correct in a large and abstract assessment that people might have trouble following.

Only problem is it's hard to sex up the term "ocean acidification." For something like that we'd need an attention-grabbing shorthand, like "melty fishy death water."

*edit: anecdote ahead

My experience working as a clean air and water advocate in my early 20s was that people who don't buy into climate change also tend to rationalize away things like potable water, wildlife, and preservation of natural resources. The venn diagram of people who don't "believe in" climate change and would support CO2 cuts to stop ocean acidification is tiny.

However, I'd love to be proven wrong.

Yeah. I think that, while there are people who value some classes of conservation without believing in climate change, climate change is in general a subset of what people don't believe in. Which is to say: Almost anything espoused by environmentalists, any program of environmental regulation, any restraint on resource extraction, etc.

I always agreed that pollution should be a higher priority than climate change. The onus is on me to drive a hybrid to reduce my co2 output, but nothing is being done to curb polluting our waterways.

Packaging is a great evil. Most of our waste is packaging. My family recycles a lot, buys glass/aluminum when possible, and still we generate 2-3 bags of garbage each week, mostly food packaging.

Just for reference, what is the size of your family and what we the sizes of the garbage bags?

2 adults 1 teen and 1 child. Just normal sized garbage bags.

And the garbage bags themselves are packaging. It's hard to escape.

The supermarkets discovered they can get you to buy more tomatoes when there are six of them in shiny cellophane, so that's what they do. It's maddening. Not only that, it's nearly impossible not to use plastic packaging if you're not handily located near a co-op (or Unverpackt, if you're in Germany). In many cases I've been looked at suspiciously when I said I didn't need a bag for my two items at the checkout, as though there were something wrong with me. Saying "it just winds up in the back of my car" usually convinced them (never mind that I cycled there...)

Cashiers are sometimes bothered when I have a bunch of veggies not in individual bags, but that bag literally lasts 10 minutes until I get home and put the produce in the fridge. It's a massive waste.

> ...people who don't buy into climate change also tend to rationalize away things like potable water, wildlife, and preservation of natural resources...

This is emergent behavior from a lifetime inculcating conditioned responses to acute challenges in narrow fields of interest, combined with a lack of frame of reference to externalities. People who never plan beyond a horizon of a few decades, and only in very constrained domains, spending the vast majority of their time addressing perceived here-and-now challenges to their social/economic/personal domains are going to find it very difficult to connect with these long-term incubation period threats.

It doesn't help that Upton Sinclair, Jr.'s The Jungle is not widely-read, or reading critical analysis non-fiction is not widespread. Nor does it help that our economic system doesn't account with a high fidelity for where we establish our entropy sinks (at our current technological level, aiming as close to the outer reaches of the solar system as we can is sufficient for now, and we move the aim point higher as we acquire more energy manipulation capabilities).

Impactful stories and imagery can sometimes pierce this veil. Connecting to an imminent threat to personal, individual health seemed to galvanize the food safety and pollution control issues, which again points us back to presenting say, ocean acidification via the lens of an acute challenge to individuals.

> you can plainly test acidification with two cups of water - tap and sparkling

How are the acidities of tap and sparkling water related to the acidity of the ocean? Don't the people who processed the drinking water exercise basic (no pun intended) control over its pH?

He meant that the concept is easy to explain and demonstrate.

Presumably showing them that these little pieces of paper are cheap and effective tests make it easier to believe that people elsewhere are performing tests reliably.

If I showed someone how to use these paper tests and showed how reliable they were, then showed a video of someone testing ocean water they, just might, just barely, hopefully might be more likely to believe me.

You can look at tap water and sparkling (tap water + CO2 injection) and note that the sparkling water is more acidic. (Because CO2 dissolves in water into carbonic acid)

CO2 + H2O ⇌ H2CO3

CO2 injection to make sparkling water is a lot like CO2 being absorbed by the oceans.

> CO2 injection to make sparkling water is a lot like CO2 being absorbed by the oceans.

So the purpose of the demonstration is to show that we're making the oceans yummier? Awesome!

Oh, I completely missed the point of the demonstration! I though there was going to be some way in which one of the kinds of water had changed from its historical pH due to indirect effects of human activity (which didn't make sense to me).

I think they mean to take tap water and carbonate it. I do this at home with a soda stream machine.

"just as climate change evolved from the use of the term global warming". Maybe officially, but I hear most people (even those who know better) still calling it global warming (and then making jokes about how its so cold they would appreciate some more global warming). At one point I thought maybe the next generation would call it climate change, but I have teenagers and they and all their friends call it global warming still (and its not due to ignorance - they full know it should be called climate change).

A highly paid political scriptwriter(& a small army of researchers) coined the phrase "climate change" and worked it into all the politicos' speeches of the day to make it stick.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/int...

It looks like he promoted use of the phrase "climate change" during the GWB administration but that's not when the phrase was coined:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climate+change...

The term "climate change" appeared in research literature long before (resistance to acknowledging) anthropogenic climate change became a significant political issue.

See for example this short 1970 communication in PNAS "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change"

http://www.pnas.org/content/67/2/898.short

I think that the term "climate change" is better than "global warming" since it also encompasses localized cooling events that might be caused by anthropogenic emissions, e.g. the hypothesized collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that could lead to colder winters in Western Europe.

I apologize, "coined the phrase" is indeed incorrect. It was a scientific term before it's mainstream usage. He intentionally initiated the substitution from GW to CC in all dialogues from the White House(the entire GOP?) which ultimately led to the mainstream usage in the public forum. After noting the change in language(and the Dems callng foul) I found his interview and how the public dialogue is orchestrated to be quite interesting. Cannot recommend the Frontline video enough.

I don't disagree, Climate Change seens more appropriate/accurate.

I've often heard Conservatives use the term "climate change" as evidence that global warming is a hoax—as if we've conceded that the planet _isn't_ warming, and that we're now just saying it's changing in some unknown way. The globe is warming. I think that term is still perfectly legitimate.

I like it!! Or "toxic plastic death water", let's start a poll!!

I gotta say, that experiment would not convince me.

I own a sodastream. To get fizzy water, I need to inject CO2 under pressure into water to get it to become fizzy.

Wafting some pure CO2 over a glass of water would not make it fizzy or change its PH

Wafting some pure CO2 over a kilometre-deep flask of water would definitely not change it

Considering we're talking about increasing the level of CO2 from 0.000002% to 0.000004%, and then wafting it around the surface of a vast ocean, I don't think the experiments can be compared at all...

>Wafting some pure CO2 over a glass of water would not make it fizzy or change its PH

Yes, it would change the pH [0]. CO2 dissolves in water to form carbonic acid [1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid

I understand the principle ;)

My point is that nature is not bubbling pure CO2 through the ocean to make it fizzy or acidic. Using fizzy water to demonstrate the acidity of the ocean is just bad science.

> increasing the level of CO2 from 0.000002% to 0.000004%

What is that a percentage of? (if it's atmosphere you meant, you've gone the wrong way with your zeros)

well we've gone from 200ppm to 400ppm. I might be a couple of zeroes off because it's a percentage, but the point is that this is trace gas, not pure CO2 which is what my sodastream uses

That would be 0.02% to 0.04%.

no, 0.02% = 0.0002 = 2 parts per ten thousand, so another two zeros on that. 0.0002% I make it

Given that polychlorinated biphenyls are so much more abundant in the deep sea trenches than even "In grossly polluted areas, like the Liao River in China" the scientist in me suspects that something other than pollution might be at play.

Perhaps deep sea organisms synthesize polychlorinated biphenyls as an adaptive response? (weirder things are known...) Or perhaps the chemical degradation of polychlorinated biphenyls is inhibited by the environment?

I had that thought as well, however when you look at the differences of the two systems I don't think it holds up well. Consider that every other tested source mentioned has a natural diluting mechanism, whether it is a river receiving runoff rainwater or a tidal area. The trench on the other hand represents a global minimum. Nothing really comes "up" from the trench in quantity so it is in some ways a perfect 'sink'. As such it may be in the process of simply getting more and more concentrated. There chemical inertness would make them extremely long lived under the conditions of the trench.

It's a sink only for things more dense than the water at that depth. Even the great pacific garbage patch floats.

I assume it's present in low concentrations in heavy trash or perhaps the flesh of creatures that sink to the bottom after death, slowly building up over time.

I'd like some more information on how much this occurs in nature.

..and yes, to start forming accurate correlation and causation arguments, we'd ideally need to know how much was present in organism 20, 30, maybe even 50 ~ 100 years ago.

Some cores taken from the mud at the bottom of the trench might answer this.

Precisely why the Mariana trench has such elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls remains unclear. Dr Jamieson suspects it has to do with the trench’s proximity to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a whirlpool hundreds of kilometres across that has amassed enormous quantities of plastics over the years, and which has the potential to send the pollutants that bind to those plastics deep into the ocean as the plastics degrade and descend.

I think that this guess is likely to be right. It would take a very long time for fluid convection and diffusion to transport these pollutants to such depths. But particles of plastic that are higher-density than water will collect a lot of these strongly hydrophobic pollutants on their surfaces and sink deeply much faster than convection/diffusion operate.

There is a "missing plastic" question in environmental science. We see a lot of plastic trash near the surface in oceans, but the visible amount is much less than the amount humans seem to be adding to the ocean each year.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/ninety-nine-percent-o...

Where is the "missing" plastic? It seems likely that some of it is sinking to the ocean floor, either because the plastic itself is denser than water or because it builds up denser-than-water growths on its surface. Finding polychlorinated biphenyls and brominated ethers concentrated at such depths is, IMO, pretty convincing evidence for plastics and the pollutants concentrated on their surfaces sinking into the benthic zone.

(Another part of the missing plastic may be gone due to colonization and digestion of plastics by natural hydrocarbon-eaters; see "Life in the “Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris" for a really fascinating paper about this phenomenon.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tracy_Mincer/publicatio... )

It's rather alarming to find such concentrated pollution so far away from its human sources. But at the risk of sounding callous, it's kind of good news for humans and our critical ecosystem services: these very deep ocean regions are relatively isolated from most seafood eaten by humans, and from the photic zone whose photosynthesis is an important part of the carbon cycle. If persistent pollution has to partition somewhere, partitioning into the deepest parts of the ocean is about the best case scenario for surface life.

hopefully people in power don't get to the idea that since it might not be harmful to us where it is at that we should purposefully put stuff there

Just for safekeeping - it may be useful later, when we get a round tuit.

That thought has already crossed their mind. I have an old textbook on energy that shows people pushing 50 gallon drums of nuclear waste into the ocean.

The "missing plastic" cannot be explained with birds and fishes even more "eating" i.e. swallowing it? And consequentially when dying taking it with them to the oceanfloor? Seems rather unintuitive.

A bit off-topic, but...

"If Mount Everest were flipped upside down into it, there would still be more than 2km of clear water between the mountain’s base and the top of the ocean"

This statement always bugs me, the elevation at Everest's base is already ~14,000ft. Its prominence is not its full elevation. When you try to have someone imagine "flipping it upside down", a person wouldn't typically consider including the surrounding terrain, but simply ignore the fact that it's already at great elevation.

I get what you're saying, but the definition of the term 'prominence' doesn't help you, because by definition, Mount Everest's 'prominence' equals its actual height above MSL. This special case is necessary to give the recursive definition of 'prominence' a base case.

However, it's true that Mount Everest's "relief above local terrain" is not equal to its actual altitude above MSL, but this is just informal empirical footballing and no rigorous technical definitions exist.

you're right, i mis-used "prominence" and meant "relief above local terrain"

If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would be.

But it nearly is one!

> If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would be.

<rant>

Blah, boring. I remember a girl describing how nice everything would be if everything was symmetrical and deterministic, from language, to language, to numbers, to nature, to math... In the end she went on describing heaven as such a place... Man, for the first time in my life I thought that if heaven is like this, I'd like never go there :-)

When Homer described Helen, he wrote "The most beautiful woman in the world", he left the details to the reader. Now imagine if he had added the slightest hint of determinism...

</rant>

I might just be arguing semantics here, but it's possible that the world we live in is determinist, just in a way too complex for us to even grasp.

That doesn't take away my argument though: It would be too boring if there was nothing patternless.

Climbers have a definition: how far is it from base camp to the top? In other words, the mountain starts where "walking" becomes something more difficult than a gravel path.

Another version of this is distance between the parking lot and the top, at what point are wheeled vehicles no longer an option?

But if you would flip the ME into it, the sealevel would rise ...

What, a couple millimeters?

So, Earth surface 510M km2, 70% water that's some 350M km2.

Everest 8km by, say, way too generously 10x20 km2, that's 1600 km3 worth of rock prism.

1.6k km3 / 350M km2 = 4.5 micro km = 4.5 millimeters.

(Yeah, a couple mm.)

Sounds like even more problems for a prospective future undersea colony beyond the crushing weight of pressure.

it's only "crushing" relative to you.

aliens may consider being at very bottom of 50mi of O2/N2 atmosphere @ 14.7 psi to be crushing relative to the vacuum of space.

yes...i think the parent is referring to humans, not aliens.

the point is, what's living at these pressures is not human, so you cannot ascribe to them a human-relative definition of "crushing". it's obviously normal and not "crushing" to them.

yes, but I imagine by "future undersea colony" Apocryphon is referring to a colony of humans...

ah, i missed that bit. time for more coffee it seems.

Most of the plastic in the ocean comes from street litter in coastal cities. If you smoke, that includes cigarette butts (the filters are not natural cellulose anymore), as well as the plastic wrapped around the package that so many let fall to the sidewalk.

I think this is my only zero vote, ever. I'm amazed that a useful and practical (for our environment) suggestion was downvoted here; whereas I'd expect that if Brietbart had a forum (which maybe they do, I rarely if ever visit the site.) Did someone not google and assume natural cellulose was obviously still used in filters? It isn't, it's synthetic, a polymer that doesn't degrade.

The Economist summary says the amphipods that were found to contain PCBs were collected by baiting traps with mackerel.

I don't have access to the original research report, but I wonder if they analyzed the mackerel for those pollutants?

From the paper: "The traps were baited with ~100 g of mackerel that was enclosed in a mesh bag to allow the development of an odour plume, but prevent the amphipods consuming any of the bait that might otherwise affect POP levels in downstream assays."

So even if the mackerel did contain the pollutants, they weren't transferred to the amphipods.

Thanks for this. I thought it was unlikely they hadn't controlled for pollution in the bait, but simple things sometimes slip through.

If this doesn't end bad for humans it sure will when it's the plot of a sci-fi horror movie.

Some day it would be awesome to build swarms of autonomous deep-sea robots. Ahhh... imagine if they ate tiny plastic like plankton for whales haha.

I know just bs, not a novel idea, until you do it just spewing smoke.

So much to learn still, I'm currently oriented to web dev not hardware programming but I have a hardware friend though, math friend, pieces will fit someday perhaps.

The ocean is such a mystery/entrancing.

Just imagine if you had a bunch of robots just out there doing there thing and you could "ssh" into them by satellite haha would be nuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com