I am surprise that people don't know, I have known for years and I know Greenpeace has been on about it for some time. You would think this would make the news more often.

Also there are several more.

This was brought to my attention a while ago, it is trully shocking. The beeb recently featured some stories about it, and awareness over here the UK is growing. One significant contributor is single use plastic grocery bags, which there are now moves to restrict or ban in the UK, though we are definitely trailing others in the regulation of this kind of pollution. And everyone should already be recycling plastic bottles, right?

The things that we humans do to the sea are truly horrifying. Especially becasue there's really no good reason for it, it's just our laziness and greed. Dragnets that scrape the sea floor and destroy all living things on it (which the fishing industry calls "bycatch" and just throws back becasue it has no "economic value", even though its already dead), pollution by fertilizers and other man-made chemical nutrients that creates huge dead zones of hypoxic water where nothing can live, 100 to 200 million sharks killed every year just for their fins, the rest of the body thrown back into the water (often alive) agan because it has no "economic value." I could go on and on.

Maybe we'll be lucky someday and some naturally-occurring bacteria (like Flavobacterium) will finally evolves to eat all of the plastic that we have littered the world with. Maybe the Earth will be even luckier and that bacterium will continue to evolve to eat humans as well and rid the planet of the pestilence that we are.

Voting for Obama isn't going to do shit for the environment.

As long as we leave environmental matters in the federal government's inept, oily hands, we will continue to see this kind of muck spread. The only positive thing to do is what we've always been told: Reduce, Re-use, and Recycle. Don't leave it up to government.

Yep, we're a pestilence alright. Vote Obama!

which would be awesome if anyone knew what it meant...
elitist!

Ooh Ooh! I know! Pick me, pick me!!! Teacher! I know!!!!

Kiss-ass

I heard about this in an anthropology class a while ago when we were talking about possible hypotheses for the spread of early apes and monkeys westward to the "new world." Apparently a lot of the grist of the hypothesis is based on the weirdly adapted eco-system (if it can even be called such) of the garbage in the Pacific.

Naturally, it's hard to swallow families of monkeys or apes making the trip on floating debris across an ocean, even given the narrower Atlantic ocean of ten million years ago.

...and speaking of millions of years? That's about how long speciation to select for digestion of microscopic plastic would take. It wouldn't take long for bacteria or the like (and may well have already happened, based on some other research in that area that I've read) but for it to move much higher on the food chain (complex animals that can make use of what the microscopic creatures convert the plastic into) would easily take "a very long time."

I had no idea...I mean I knew about the other pollution problems that get press...but this really just makes me sick. Thanks for the heads up Flux! -- And by the way I love the new Obama catch-phrase

Well that gives some potential insight into the collapse of the fisheries too. I think we may be heartbeats away form some stunning ecocsystem collapse. Good article Flux!

I'd be interested to see sources there. Partly because what you're proposing is plastic-eating bacteria (which would be very interesting and potentially a considerable problem); partly because if you're right then the bacteria will spread very rapidly, since nothing is able to eat them.

Fisheries collapse is almost certainly due primarily to over-fishing. Though the chance of carbon-dioxide-driven ocean acidification looks like a potential global catastrophe.

i didnt know about it, but im not at all surprised. one more example, if we needed one, that Man has touched (and polluted) every square inch of this planet. sadness.

nice article Flux, thanks!