Trillions of plastic pieces found in Arctic ice | Hacker News Reader

Trillions of plastic pieces found in Arctic ice

usatoday.com

100 pointslelf51 comments

What's terrifying to me is that the more our science moves forward, the more we're realizing that we've fucked up the Earth in ways we had no clue about. It's likely going to get worse and worse as time goes on, and it's reaching a scope where undoing the damage is more and more unlikely.

It'll be interesting to read follow up studies about the impacts this has on the ecosystems. It's freaky how interconnected oceans are.

We fucked up our own survival,and future generations will hate us for that.

Earth will go on for billions of years after we are gone.

Do you find some kind of solace in your (unfounded) assumption that the earth will outlive humanity?

The best place to find common ground for us on environmental issues is to look at the human. We are doing this to ourselves, our environment.

Two reasons for this view:

* Invoke a sense of urgency in the fact that it is our own situation that is at stake, not some abstract external good that only hippies ought to care for.

* Because the value of human life is a moral pillar we all share, while I can't find any reason to value existing species over new species, or newly emerging moss species over species that might go extinct.

> Do you find some kind of solace in your (unfounded) assumption that the earth will outlive humanity?

I'm struggling to come up with an even remotely likely scenario where that wouldn't be the case....getting sucked into a black hole would be one I suppose.

If we achieve interstellar travel, we will spread to other planets. I see no reason to assume that none of our future colonies could outlive this planet.

Hmmmm....which is more likely, hard to say.

Not sure if you based it on this, but it's a very famous argument made by George Carlin [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

> Earth will go on for billions of years after we are gone.

I used to use this phrase too, but now I think there is a lot of overestimation in such understatements. It basically says that you are thinking in time scales much bigger than centuries: You think in billions of years.

Besides that I'm not sure anymore if this is really true from a factual point.

I mean - where are we after we burned all fossil and nuclear resources? This would be a very new situation for humanity but also for the rest of the living system on this planet. What happens with all the CO2, what happens with all the plutinium?

In a relatively short timespan of 2-3 years almost half the bees in my country died. Nobody saw that coming, nobody want/cant do something about it. Thinking that further, what would happen to our biosphere if pollination would stop working withing a short period of time? All living life is reciprocally developed in a long running evolutionary process.

So, I think this phrase is used a little too careless, we simply don't no how Earth react on fundamental changes that are happen quickly.

The fucking up is still accelerating, with fracking and the rise of China with its effect on pollution and resource consumption just being two examples. What's so striking is the fact that despite being a generation that is blessed with having access to all the world's information we are still not enlightened, meaning we are still not able to strive for global optima rather than our own short-term benefit. One would think that as a civilization we should have advanced more.

There are 3 things our descendant would have a facepalm for. They could carrot the ice over the last thousand year and notice a short time when all the oil we dug up from underground would form a thick deposit all around the globe in various forms. They might even happen to know we had a different word for economy and ecology. Worse, it may reach their ears our most common way of expressing this concern was to like campaigns on facebook. We should build a big facepalm statue in memory for our children.

Half the oil that enters the sea comes form natural sources. It is consumed by organisms able to metabolize hydrocarbons.

Source: http://www.whoi.edu/oilinocean/page.do?pid=51880

Thus, I don't think anyone would expect the world to be covered in oil.

The paradox of too much information / choice. You become desensitized and thus as a populous just resort to self-preservation. That echoes from the sources of pollution all the way to the consumers. Either culture needs to change and make it a priority, or businesses need to be disrupted by better choices so the old guard can die.

I've said it before, and most people just shrug it off, but our best chances for the long term survival of our species and planet are to get humans off the planet, whether Mars or asteroids or giant space cruise liners, and turn the earth into a wildlife preserve. Give the planet a much needed human-extinction event by leaving on our own.

From a human habitability point of view, Mars is fucked worse than the worst thing we could possibly do to Earth (short of accidentally blowing it into an asteroid cloud.) It doesn't even have (enough) water or (the right kind of) atmosphere or gravity! It's a rock in space. Terraforming Mars, or any planet we can currently reach without faster-than-light flight, would require an immense leap in technology, including technologies we're currently not even studying. We'd have to build a whole new planet from basically scratch.

On the other hand, we could go quite a long way towards fixing the perfectly good planet we already live on with technologies we already have. Hell, I suspect we could get 90 % of the way there with a century of strict population control and putting the same effort into reducing pollution and emissions we currently put into developing more profitable technologies. We're mostly not dumping our waste in the oceans and the atmosphere because we have no other choice, but because it's cheap and convenient and because humanity as a whole has other priorities than the preservation of the planet.

I'm waiting to hear how interesting effects carbon nanotubes and Buckyballs will have on our environment. When all kind of products are going to contain those.

Maybe I'm missing an important detail about the lifecycle of arctic ice, but...

If the arctic ice contains plastic particles...

And the particles are man made...

And man has only been making small plastic particles for roughly 100 years...

That would mean that the arctic ice was, at some point in the recent 100 years, ordinary sea water polluted with small plastic particles.

If this ice... was sea water in the recent past, then it must be superficial ice.

If superficial arctic ice is young enough to contain plastics, and is now melting, then this marks the return of sea water from as recent as 50-100 years ago...

If melting polar ice, polluted with plastics, is a new and disturbing event, then...

Does this mean that this is the first time polar ice of that age is melting?

If 50-100-year-old polar ice is only melting just now, for the first time, then, in terms of rising sea levels, does this mean that sea levels have, thus far, only risen to their state as they existed at the end of the 19th century?

Or, is it that the arctic polar ice cap completely melts every summer and refreezes every winter?

If so, then won't a similar amount of plastic be recaptured when the arctic polar ice cap refreezes? Or are we now fretting at the idea that the arctic polar ice cap will fail to refreeze?

And doesn't that mean that 2 years ago, and 10 years ago, the polar ice cap was capturing just as many plastic particles when it refroze?

And if this plastic-bound ice has also melted during the past few summers, didn't it redistibute its captured plastics back into the ocean?

If the arctic ice cap is (or was) trapping large quantities of man-made plastics, then the sea ice doesn't seem to be the real story here.

The real story seems to be the horrendous amount of plastics in the ocean. The arctic polar ice cap, on the other, hand seems to be an unfortunate additional detail.

Yes it melts, yes it refreezes. But more is melting each summer, and less is refreezing each winter. That's why there's excitement about opening of the northwest passage - shipping and oil drilling in the arctic that wasn't previously possible.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/05/Figure3.png

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/climate-chang...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/opening-of-northwe...

"That's why there's excitement about opening of the northwest passage - shipping and oil drilling in the arctic that wasn't previously possible."

That's a glass is half full way of looking at it!

I was leaving the obvious unsaid; the shipping/resource-exploitation aspect isn't as well known. I guess we'll be finding out what happens when an oil spill gets caught up in arctic ice in the next decade or so.

Amount of old ice in Arctic, 1987-2013:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-BbPBg3vj8

Yes, you're missing an important detail about the lifecycle of arctic ice.

Multi-year ice is about 6 years old. There's no 100 year old ice there. Every year it gets slushed, reaches a minimum around September and builds up again. The minima are dropping, btw. Both in extent as in volume.

There is no 100 year old ice out there"

Where are we getting the air samples to determine what CO2 levels from? I thought it was from bubbles trapped in ice that is 100+ years old.

The Antarctic, Greenland, other glaciers.

Great point. Glaciers on land are diffrent. There are also some ancient/long-lived ice formations in the south pole (also land/locked). I believe these are more like frozen freshwater lakes than glaciers (mobile, compacted snow etc).

You misquoted me, please re-read it.

Even when it had permanent areas, floating ice exists in equilibrium. If you add ice on the top, the bottom melts due to pressure.

Linkbait headline.

0.00394 inches = 1 trillion per cubic meter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbeads#Controversy

It is still a huge environmental problem

But then we continue:

"Rayon was the most common synthetic material discovered -- 54%. Though rayon is not a plastic (it's made from wood), the authors included it"

Only to later find this is all about global warming (?)

"Global warming releases microplastic legacy frozen in Arctic Sea ice"

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014EF000240/abst...

I wonder how all these pieces of plastic in the ice will affect its melting temperature and it's strength. There is a good research paper there with data that could affect estimates on freeze and melt rates of winter ice, formulas used to calculate when ice packs start to break up, ship hull strength requirements for different depths of ice, etc.

It mentions pieces smaller than 5mm and talks about fibers from clothing that's been washed. Perhaps that's why the concentration is 1,000 greater than the Great Pacific garbage patch?

I'm curious if the comparison is apples to apples or not. Regardless it's terrible.

Leaded gasoline, testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, plastic everywhere, chemicals in plastic that interfere with the endocrine system, massive use of antibiotics in farming, Roundup-resistant weeds... All these malpractices have large, measurable, global impacts. It's a wonder we have not caused a mass-poisoning crises or disease outbreak that has an obvious effect on lifespan or fertility.

It just means that sooner or later we will have mutations occurring in the general population.

Haven't we?

We spend billions on supposedly averting a crisis predicted by lousy models but appear to ignore grotesque pollution of the oceans of which this is one example. Mercury and other nasties being another. But the list goes on and on.

> Though the finding is surprising and worrying, the possible harm to marine life is so far unknown, the authors concluded.

Sentences like this is not science. It's FUD.

And as such I find the entire article dodgy. I can't see Arctic ice containing massive amounts or plastic compared to the oceans. Nor have I seen evidence that plastics in the oceans can cause any large scale harm anyway.

As compared to over fishing which we do know is causing harm. I don't really understand they people divert from real known issues to these end of the world style made up catastrophes.

It isn't the large scale harm we are looking after. If we know such harm exists then it would be too late to step in.

Here is a documentary of what happen to the millions or even trillions of plastic flooding around the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulkY7mOkdqs

Is this a small harm or big harm? What if an entire population on some distant island gets wiped out because of that? How would we know? Even for a small number of death, we are responsible to help clean up the ocean as much as possible, just as we are responsible for cleaning up all the space debris. Is it right that we just blow up a satellite and not worry about the orbital debris?

If it's not right, we don't do it, regardless of how small the harm is. If we overfishing, we ought to mark certain part of the ocean free from fishing.

http://ocean.si.edu/laysan-albatross-plastic-problem

How serious does something have to be before we do something about it?

Garbage patches in the oceans are real and affect a lot of wildlife. They might not be as severe as over dishing o bogus scientific whaling but they are still important.

So since this is an entrepreneurial community (supposedly), who knows the wholesale value of this material? One could probably wrangle a government grant to clean this stuff up, collect it, and then sell it to wholesale recyclers at a profit.

If there a trillions of plastic pieces in Arctic ice, then what about our oceans and rivers?

Think of life with plastic bits in our water supply. How will life survive with plastic bits in water?

Think of life with plastic bits in our water supply.

Filters work really well to remove those, but most of the other life on Earth doesn't use filtered water... regardless, these plastic bits seem pretty inert.

Inert, yes. But they can fill the digestive system of some creatures who then cannot eat enough food to survive.

I'm not sure how relevnt it is here though. http://ocean.si.edu/laysan-albatross-plastic-problem

You know those pictures are faked right? (Maybe it says that there, I didn't check.)

This microparticles would not have that affect anyway though.

Can you please provide a reference to prove fakery. I immediately suspected the photos looked setup, but am having trouble finding proof.

As far as I know the poctures are real. If you xan find any source that credibly shows he did anything but photograph carcasses then I'll accept the images are faked.

Here's a video where he claims to disect a corpse. Is this also faked?

http://www.midwayjourney.com/2010/07/10/midway-journey-ii-ju...

You say that these microplastics would not have this effect.

Here are some articles suggesting that microplastics may be killing fish and other wildlife: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microplastic-pollu...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16709045

I can't find it. My understanding is he posed the birds to show how how much garbage would be found in them.

I'm not saying birds don't have plastic in their stomach though, just not that much.

I can believe microplastics would kill tiny animals, but not larger ones. It doesn't belong in water either way.

I'm not sure what you're saying - did he add plastic? (That would destroy the credibility of the photographs) or did he take a bird corpse and pose the corpse but without adding any plastic? (That would be a stupid thing for him to do but is irrelevant to the plastic argument)

Birds can survive with some plastic, they swallow stuff for their gizzard anyway, but they mistake plastic for food and die from eating too much which prevents them eating enough food to get nutrition. I think this is accepted and not controversial.

Microplastics are eaten directly by many animals. As shown hy the links I provided some of those plastics migrate from the stomach to the bloodstream. The plastics are then part of the foodchain. The plastics absorb contaminants. So it's not just inert plastic, it is the PCBs and DDT and etc that the plastics contain that are problematic.

With all of the concern for the environment, why aren't rich people of the world (home owners in the U.S. for example) covering their roofs with solar panels? To me, this is the best solution because we still get our comforts (computers, air conditioning), but decrease coal, gas and oil usage.

It's still expensive, but would be a good option if we figured all of the long term costs in.

Not to mention the Great Pacific Garbage patch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

The article makes mention to the Pacific Garbage patch as a comparison

"The concentration of plastic debris [estimated from core samples of arctic ice] is 1,000 times greater than that floating in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

Wikipedia says GPGP has about 5kg of plastic suspended per square kilometer of ocean.

1 cubic meter of water is 1000 liters and 1000kgs. 1 square kilometer, and let's say all the plastic is within 1 meter of depth would be 1 million cubic meters of water, or 1billion kilograms.

So another way to think about it is dilute plastic molecules at about 5 parts per billion. The big assumption is 1 meter depth, because if it's actually concentrated more like within 1cm of depth then it's 500 ppb.

This is the worse thing I've read since they spelt all that salt into the ocean.

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