What mh370 told us - the oceans are awash with trash
In the search for
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 we have found that the seas are littered
with human trash, and it's killing the oceanic ecosystem.
by Paul Mobbs
Over several weeks the news has been dominated by the story of
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The plane, with 227 passengers and 12
crew on board, lost contact with ground radar on the March 8 - and no
trace of it has been found since.
It's not that difficult to lose a plane at sea.
From the outset of the rescue operation there were reports of oil
slicks and drifting debris spotted in the South China Sea. When the
focus shifted to first the northern, then southern, and then back to the
middle of the Indian Ocean, yet more debris was spotted. Satellite
photos from different nations were strewn across news casts show objects
floating in the water. Spotter planes also reported seeing collections
of floating debris.
The trash is everywhere
Since the plane's loss we've had almost daily reports of possible
debris. Despite hopes being raised each time a large patch of debris was
found, on investigation none of this debris found had any link to the
missing plane.
A month later, the most significant untold story of the search for
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is that our oceans are full of trash!
That trash comes in all shapes and sizes, and, for the first time, the
amount of trash out there is hampering all efforts to try and find the
possible location of the plane.
The large chunks spotted by satellite and search plane - a few metres
across - represent the smallest fraction of the sum of human waste
dumped in the oceans.
What the rescue services have seen is just the waste which floats - a
lot also sinks to the bottom. In fact, the bulk of the human waste in
the oceans is made up of particles only a millimetre or two across.
The problem is that the oceans are very big - and so it's easy to
hide an awful lot of human wastes out there.
However, some recent studies have shown that the amount of waste in
the water column now outweighs the plankton by up to six-to one.
In places the debris is so dense that we see reef fish, usually only
found on the coastal fringe, living within the debris in the middle of
the open oceans. Drifting waste is concentrated by winds, waves and
ocean currents.
You may have heard of the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the middle
of the Pacific. There are in fact five ocean gyres which now concentrate
human waste.
One of them, the Indian Ocean Gyre, covers the area to the west of
Australia where the search effort for flight MH370 is now centred.
That's what's making the search for the plane so difficult - there's an
awful lot of garbage drifting around just there.
The rise is inexorable
Learned articles have been written about the problems of waste in the
oceans for some time.
The eco-concerns of the 1970s led to the adoption of the London
Dumping Convention - and yet, despite many campaigns, this seems to have
had little impact on the inexorable rise of the volumes of waste now
entering the world's ocean systems.
This material is poisoning the oceans. As one recent study states,
The longevity of plastic is estimated to be hundreds to thousands of
years, but is likely to be far longer in deep sea and non-surface polar
environments.
Plastic debris poses considerable threat by choking and starving
wildlife, distributing non-native and potentially harmful organisms,
absorbing toxic chemicals and degrading to micro-plastics that may
subsequently be ingested.
We know that plastics are now disruptively re-engineering marine
ecology,harming ocean life, and that this ultimately threatens the human
food supply.
The difficulty is that solving this problem is centred on that
multi-faceted phenomenon which is at the root of so many ecological
issues - the throwaway consumer society.The loss of Malaysia Airlines
flight MH370 is a human tragedy. But the factors which are today
exacerbating the search for the plane mark an even greater human tragedy
in the future.
One which, as recent coverage of the rescue operations shows, we are
myopically incapable of recognising as a greater danger to us all.
Third World Network Features.
|