photos by Bob Talbot, LegaSea Project (left) and Tom Campbell (right).
Both shared through Marine Photobank.
if you ever find yourself throwing something away that has the potential to strangle yourself/something else, cut it up into string!
"Almost every tow we did contained plastic, regardless of the depth."
Giora Proskurowski, a University of Washington researcher. His new research has found that natural ocean processes such as wind, drag, turbulence and wave height can push the plastic deep down, where it floats along, suspended underwater and unobserved by people examining the ocean’s surface.
The new report claims scientists have only skimmed the surface on the devastating pollution caused by plastic debris in the ocean, and the research community is likely underestimating the amount of plastic in the ocean. Read more. (via centerforinvestigativereporting)
The new report claims scientists have only skimmed the surface on the devastating pollution caused by plastic debris in the ocean, and the research community is likely underestimating the amount of plastic in the ocean. Read more. (via centerforinvestigativereporting)
Manila is one of the world’s five dirtiest cities, but graffiti? That’s not a problem. It’s not that people don’t paint on the walls in the hyper-polluted Philippines capital, because they do. But they do it with a paint that actually eats smog out of the air. The catalytic paint, called Boysen KNOxOUT, reacts with light and water vapor to filter out nitrogen oxides. An environmental scientist interviewed in this BBC video says it can scrub out 20 percent of polluting nitrogen. Manila is deploying the paint in the form of massive murals, which are both beautiful and, because of their size, effective. Eleven square feet of paint-covered surface can absorb as much pollution as a full-grown tree, and these murals are close to 11 THOUSAND square feet. If we could get this stuff into the hands of street artists and taggers, it would be like having an army of energetic teenagers planting trees all over the city all day, every day. (via Super-polluted city tries to clean itself with smog-eating paint | Grist)
In 2010, Thailand dumped 27 army tanks, 273 old train carts, and 198 garbage trucks into the sea. Local fishermen petitioned the government to help with declining fish stocks, e.g., overfishing. In response, the government came up with the idea to dump the decommissioned vehicles into the shallows to create an artificial reef. The “reef,” in turn, would become a breeding ground for fish. This would help the fishermen increase their catch.
It’s been two years and I’d like to see how the project has fared. Can anyone find a follow up to this story? Send me a link.
Article here. Al Jazeera’s supreme coverage below.
Tigers are not for ever.
Every carat of extracted diamond for your uproots, pollutes and damages the natural habitat of our wildlife. Forever.
Wasting away: Our garbage by the numbers
The average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day.In today’s culture of mass consumption, the things we throw away often vanish from our minds, but all that trash has to go somewhere. Look at the numbers on garbage and you’ll see it’s more than just trashy — it’s appalling. Luckily, there’s plenty we can do about it.
How to starve to death on a full stomach. The 272 pieces of rubbish pictured above were fed to this fledgling albatross along with fish caught by its mother. The plastic accumulated in its stomach until it was literally ‘too full to eat’. Careless and unregulated dumping is just one of the ways we’re killing our oceans.
cwnl:
Rivers of Melting Ice Mapped in Antarctica
The first-ever map of how Antarctica’s ice is moving across that continent has been created by researchers at the University of California, Irvine.
The map, along with an associated animation developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and blue. Though it’s ice that’s moving, not water, “you can imagine it like a river system,” says Bernd Scheuchl, one of the map’s creators. The fastest ice flows out to sea at a rate of a few kilometers a year. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers on the west coast are the most active.
The team was surprised by how far inland they found fast-moving ice, Scheuchl says. So, if Antarctica loses a great deal of its coastal ice to climate change in the coming decades, large quantities of interior ice could follow. “That’s critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise,” NASA polar scientist Thomas Wagner said in a prepared statement.
To create this view of Antarctic ice flow, the UC Irvine researchers relied on data from satellites operated by Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Flow was tracked from 2007 to 2009 during a period of intense scientific monitoring of Earth’s poles that researchers all over the world had agreed to do. A report on the map was published online August 18 in Science.
Journal Reference: Science
Fracking wastewater devours all life in West Virginia forest
Fracking fluid, the liquid waste left over from the controversial mining technique, wreacked havoc on a test plot of land in a test by the U.S. Forest Service.
