Brazilian researchers find plastic rocks on remote island
reuters.com
reuters.com
It might kill us, but then new creatures will evolve and grow, with plastic being part of their ecosystem, perhaps even desirable. In million years the future civilization of these creatures might have "plastic preservation programs" because the old plastic rocks are a finite resource upon witch their culture was built.
They might even gaze upon their plastic-filled oceans in awe, with some quasi-religious gratitude for the ancient race that gracefully filled the world with plastic that they might thrive.
I always knew someone would see me as a god despite what my wife says.
Is that possible? As far as I know nothing consumes rocks and they've been around forever.
Can you burn rocks? No. Can you burn plastics? Generally yes. Therefor there is useful energy to be extracted from plastics.
NB, the quote was " part of their ecosystem" not "consumes". Molluscs, corals and diatoms construct out of rock-like materials, so making minerals part of their ecosystem is a thing.
Rocks do turn into soil which is then the basis for stuff to grow on it.
They only obstacle is to figure out set of enzymes that can do the burning in controleed manners. Life is very good at figuring that stuff out, it just takes time.
Rocks pretty much don't burn. Although I wouldn't be surprised if in water environments there are some organisms that can utilize some rocks in their metabolism. It's just that rocks are pretty much useless on the surface that's why nothing eats them here.
Similarly with coal underground. In airless environment coal is just rock. If there was plenty of it on the surface something would metabolise it for energy. I think coal from burnt forest doesn't just remain on the ground. Something probably eats it.
Another example is oxygen. Highly corrosive gas that early on in Earth's existance was rare, but some organisms excreted it as a wastproduct of their metabolism. It got so bad that high concentration of oxygen in atmosphere wiped nearly all life on earth until the life adapted.
And now came humans, who utilize the heaps and volumes of trash and waste left by other species. And produce their own that will stay on Earth for many millenia, long after humans in modern sense are gone.
Edit: Those are homes for the animals while they're alive, of course, but after the animal dies you could view the remaining coral as a form of waste. Certainly that's how we'd view a big pile of abandoned mobile homes.
The truth is we ultimately don't know what the consequences will be. To your analogy, this really could be more of a match than a forest fire. We just don't know.
I'm not trying to be dismissive though... It's concerning for sure, but I don't think we know enough to be terrified. Although, I'm happy to be corrected.
If I put 1 bullet in a revolver and spun the chamber, would I feel afraid to pull the trigger with the gun to my head? I wouldn't really know that I was in danger, just that there was a chance... Yet I would be afraid, and really should be.
Maybe the difference is that other people wouldn't put the risk of ruin at 1/6. Or perhaps it's just the "black swan effect" (the human tendency to treat improbable events as impossible).
Say we have the same revolver with a single bullet. But this bullet doesn't kill. If you pull the trigger and the bullet fires, everyone's life may or may not be negatively impacted by an unknown degree sometime in the coming decades.
I may feel hesitation, but I would not feel fear.
It's not because it's a rare event, it's because it's a slow, "invisible", and uncertain event.
Closer to today would be Atlantis, if it was an island then it might still be somewhere under the sea / sediment.
Not to say I believe a iota in such an hypothesis though.
It's even more beautiful than tangled nets and other plastic debris.
I'm not trying to defend it mind you, we really really need to do a better job of keeping plastic out of the oceans.
This was really hammered home to me on a trip I took a couple of months ago. I was on an uninhabited island and, while the island as a whole was beautiful, the beaches were all COVERED in plastic debris from the high-tide line upwards. It was really quite shocking to see.
I knew that there's a lot of plastic floating in the oceans, but I hadn't considered how much of it gets washed ashore. It doesn't accumulate if there's someone around to clean it up, but in uninhabited areas it's devastating. I wouldn't have believed how bad things are if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.
I wrote about the whole trip here, scroll down about halfway for a photo of what I'm talking about:
I often feel powerless when a call to action is cloaked with the phrase "we must do ${something}" Some data at least gives me a concrete talking point if I ever talk to my local congress /parliament representative.
I have totally lost faith in recycling anything other than aluminum/glass/some paper in single stream recycling.
Is this verified? I have a theory (and haven't bothered to investigate so that one's on me) that a lot of recycling is just parceling it up and exporting it to landfill or incinerators abroad.
Mind you, the plastics found in the ocean should be traceable back to their origins; they may be from e.g. Asian rivers, but if the origin is from the US or Europe you know whose fault it is.
The solution is to have more regulations about where US waste processors can send recycling to prevent sending to dubious places that throw it away. It is better if recycling goes to the landfill in US instead of playing hot potato.
That's pollution, friends.
There is a surplus of all kinds of bouys, you can often see them repurposes for other uses in seaside towns but many just get dumped.
I don't think is a big concern but it's funny considering they are scrutinizing what other organizations are releasing to the river
[1] excluding the "no plastics in the ocean" choice, of course
The origin of these melted plastic blobs are what's interesting. People here treat the discovery as some kind of warning against pollution, but it's an oddity: something that has been found in only one place.
That sounds like air temperature. Surface temperature gets way hotter. It’s well known you can cook an egg on desert sand.
The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record.
It’s like the hotdog meme guy.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/were-all-trying-to-find-the-g...
Most plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to shipping and in particular fishing[0]. Nothing I can do individually can address this, change must come from World leaders and industry bodies working in good faith across international borders. They all know this is happening, they all know measures that could be taken to address it.
Much of the framing of climate change and pollution as individual responsibility comes from large industry bodies themselves, who would much rather you feel guilty about it personally rather than wonder if they might be to blame.[1]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
[1]: Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
Yes, but lack of individual action also cannot stem climate change and mass plastic pollution.
> Most plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to shipping and in particular fishing[0]. Nothing I can do individually can address this
You can stop eating fish and you can limit the amount of junk you buy! But if you like eating fish and you like buying junk and you don’t want to inconvenience yourself, you’ll say that it’s the world leaders and industry bodies who must change.
And don’t get me wrong, this is an absolutely fine stance to have. You and I will be dead before the consequences of our choices are felt. But don’t pretend like there’s nothing you can do. It’s just that there’s nothing you actually want to do.
Focusing on personal consumption is an illness of upper middle class Americans that keeps you from focusing your efforts on activity that might lead the actual change.
You can take individual action and put effort into activity that might lead to actual change. But I’m guessing most people opt for the make no change, blame someone else, and put no effort into activity that might lead to actual change option. And again, nothing wrong with this! It’s our planet to fuck up.
There are other problems where personal action on an individual level can make positive change, but this isn't one of them.
Of course they do!
You are reducing your contribution to future plastic in the environment. We can argue over the extent of the difference this choice makes but to say it makes no difference is absurd.
> The idea that you as an individual can’t make choices that are better for the world is self-delusion. You choose not to make those choices because it is easier to blame someone else. And again, there’s nothing wrong with this.
—when your whole point is that there's something wrong with it?!
And it's mixed with unnecessarily confrontational language—"absurd", "self-delusion".
I'm vegetarian, yet these plastic rocks still exist: my actions did not prevent their formation.
Collective action is needed. That will not happen until the "good" actions (e.g. using recyclable materials) are easier/cheaper than the "bad" ones (e.g. single-use, unrecyclable plastic trash). There are two ways to do that:
- Make the "good" actions easier/cheaper. This is very difficult, and may require new inventions, etc.
- Make the "bad" actions harder/expensive. This can be done using regulation and taxation; which (in a democracy) requires collective action.
But your actions are contributing less to the creation of new plastic rocks compared to the person who is out there buying a can of tuna. Whether your choice as an individual has a significant effect is another question. But it’s undeniable that one choice is better for the environment than another. As people we can make the better choice or the worse choice. It’s up to us as individuals.
Anybody who’s eating a can of tuna waiting for new inventions and government to save the day is just deluding themselves.
Voting with my wallet for sustainably farmed fish doesn't really affect anything either - this will always be a niche, high-end market that's unaffordable for most unless the fundamentals at the bottom end of the market change.
Fish is not the issue, fishing is, and only global regulation of the fishing industry can resolve the issue of (that industry's contribution to) ocean plastic pollution.
Sure, but such an impoverished "choice" is essentially "do nothing" or "do nothing, with the option of eating tuna". It's basically table-stakes: once you've made the easy choices you have control over, it's time to make difficult choices which involve many people. (I see voting the same way: the first step of political engagement)
> waiting for new inventions and government to save the day
That's a straw man; nobody is saying that's a solution. If you insist on viewing everything through the lens of individual choice, then we can just apply your own reasoning to more impactful choices, e.g. as an individual I can:
- "petition legislatures for stronger fishing regulations" or "don't petition legislatures for stronger fishing regulations"
- "file lawsuits against organisations/individuals breaking regulations" or "don't file lawsuits against organisations/individuals breaking regulations"
- "campaign for representatives with good environmentalism credentials for key posts" or "don't campaign for representatives with good environmentalism credentials for key posts"
- "infiltrate and disrupt environmentally-damaging organisations" or "don't infiltrate and disrupt environmentally-damaging organisations"
- "help organise and spread awareness of collective efforts at systemic change" or "don't help organise and spread awareness of collective efforts at systemic change"
- etc.
These are all individual, personal choices; and are likely more impactful than choosing whether or not to eat fish. Since it's pretty cumbersome to talk about "individually choosing to work alongside other individuals in an effort to support each others' efforts to implement changes that adjust the cost/benefit ratio of the choices of other individuals who may have large impacts on the environment", it's common to abbreviate this using phrases like "collective action" and "systemic change".
Yes and my point is that the vast majority of people don't even make the easy choices let alone the hard ones.
They pretend the easy choices are hard and that the hard choices don't exist.
If a modern chemical plant is sloppy with $Stable_Chemical, then it's no surprise to find that chemical in the ground under it, in the groundwater, etc.
The bottom of the Mediterranean is littered with thousands-of-years-old pottery fragments from ancient shipwrecks and such.
Coal mining is a thing, all over the world, because microorganisms mostly couldn't break down dead trees back during the Carboniferous Era - ~300 million years ago.
The sedimentary process how the Earth deals with ~anything that water doesn't dissolve, and microorganisms & such can't break down. That has not been news since 4 or so billion years ago.
Just look at the photo's of london when people burn coal for residential heating.
Sounds darn similar to what modern humans are doing, eh?
My general point was that most people were illiterate, proper science was almost never done, mysticism, etc and knowledge about hazards to the environment were not discussed.
Therefore the decisions back then didn't consider environmental issues so it's not a good comparison to what's happening today.
> yeah it's just like trees over millions of years
The process being logical doesn't mean it's not worrying, especially when you look at the scale and pace of it
EDIT: The article is in Reuters. Vs. if it had been in a "Science News Supplement for Grades 3 and 4", I'd have seen the tone as fairly reasonable.
Of the 3 items I mentioned, by far the worst (given that we've been burning it for centuries) is plausibly coal. For example - https://phys.org/news/2020-01-shutdown-coal-fired-crop-yield...
I'm sure the amount pre industrial revolution is insignificantly small compared to recent decades
Who cares if we live on a non diverse plastic rock...
I thought a lot would care but often enough I get corrected even on hn