Delaware Feeding the Atlantic Trash Vortex

We're probably all aware of the vortex of trash swirling in the Pacific Ocean, but this is new.  This interesting piece graced the front page of the Delaware News Journal Sunday last. Are we finally beginning to "get it" about our habits and ways we abuse our environment?  My hat is off to Molly Murray and the NJ for the coverage.

One day a year, thousands of Delawareans gather on beaches and shorelines from Brandywine Creek to Broadkill Beach to Fenwick Island to pick up the castoffs of living in a convenience-driven society.
Cigarette butts, clothing, glass, plastic bottles, disposable spoons, knives and forks, grocery bags.
"It's the usual things that are left behind," said Marcia Maldeis, of Rehoboth Beach, who with her husband, Stan Mills, has been captaining a cleanup at Lewes Beach for years.
But only so much can be gathered in a day. Much of what doesn't get picked up is swept out to sea, where, after a voyage of 40 to 60 days, the flotsam gets sucked into the Atlantic Trash Gyre, a great swirling mass of man-made debris a few hundred miles off Delaware's shore in an area of the ocean known as the North Sargasso Sea.
The size of this slowly turning mass of seaweed and plastic bits strains belief. From land, the epicenter of the north edge is about middle New Jersey. The southern edge would be somewhere off the coast of Atlanta.
Researchers aren't sure how far east it extends, though. Last summer, they tried to find the eastern edge.
"We never actually got to the edge," said Kara Lavender Law, one of the top researchers on the gyre. All they know is it is beyond Bermuda.
Waves, sunlight and -- researchers believe -- tiny living things break down the trash into tiny pieces and chemical traces that eventually return to shore, lapping the ankles of tourists at Rehoboth and Bethany beaches.
At the Ocean Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental advocacy group, scientists estimate that 60 percent to 80 percent of the world's marine debris starts on land.
In 2009, volunteers worldwide picked up 7.4 million pounds of debris from shorelines like Lewes Beach.
But enough was left to feed the trash gyre, which has spun for decades undetected until its existence was verified last fall.
The next step is to convince people they are contaminating distant seas with their trash.
[snip]

Renewed interest

If you travel due east from Cape Henlopen, past the gulf stream and the drop-off that marks the edge of the continental shelf, you reach the northern Sargasso Sea.
Think of the middle of nowhere on land and double the remoteness factor. That is what the Sargasso Sea is like. Here, the water is three miles deep and is exceptionally blue. The salt content is high. The water is clear and warm.
Some call it a floating desert because it is filled with seaweed. Ancient sailors thought sargassum grasses could hold their ships captive.
Others call it a floating ecosystem, rich with two main types of marine plants: sargassum natans and sargassum fluitans.
Sexually mature eels migrate from places like Millsboro Pond in Delaware to the Sargasso Sea, where they mate, spawn and die.
The baby eels join a living nursery community among the sargassum weeds until they swim back across the ocean to places like Indian River Inlet, where they are drawn to fresh water upstream.
Scientists estimate that about a third of Atlantic plankton is produced in the Sargasso Sea.
It is a nursery ground of crabs, shrimp and invertebrates -- many of which cling to the floating seaweed.
It is also the ultimate destination of much of the trash discarded on Delaware beaches.
Sailing through it, you won't see large patches of obvious litter -- no accumulations of plastic netting, fishing gear, buckets or bottles like you see back on beaches.
"This is a very common misconception," Lavender Law said.
By the time the plastic floats into the gyre, it has typically been broken and buffeted by winds, waves, current, ultraviolet light and warm temperatures.
In fact, researchers said, they might have missed the plastic accumulation there were it not for the plankton nets, which take samples from the water surface to about 10 inches deep.
Undergraduate students join SEA research cruises to work on independent research projects. As part of that work, the SEA research teams routinely pulled neuston nets, small-meshed nets used to collect plankton.
"As early as the late 1970s, students and researchers started to notice plastics" in the plankton nets, she said.
In the 1980s, R. Jude Wilber, then an SEA scientist, published one of the first papers that discussed the marine debris problem in the Atlantic Ocean.
"It's virtually impossible to tow a Neuston net through the surface waters of the Sargasso Sea and not catch plastic debris of some sort," he wrote in a 1987 paper for Oceanus.
Early research focused on the massive trash gyre in the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Trash Gyre is also filled with small fragments of trash.
No one really looked at the Atlantic again until Lavender Law and the SEA researchers started to analyze two decades of data. Over the years, a collection of researchers and student scientists keep marine debris data from hundreds of plankton trawls, and they also archived samples of the plastics. For nearly two decades, students and faculty at SEA counted plastic fragments in their collection nets. Their study was released in September.
"Now there's a renewed interest," she said.

I suppose it's safe to say that there are probably more of these in every sea and ocean on the planet.  Not a pretty picture, is it?

There's more HERE. And it's well worth the read.

More later.
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