The North Pacific Gyre: deadly plastic debris soup

“What have the albatross, ‘distinguished strangers who have come down to us from another world,’ ever done to us?”
(November 2007 in the Shambhala Sun, Writers and the War Against Nature)

I recently touched on the plight of the highly endangered albatross in relation to devastating longline fishing practices. Drowning through being hooked and dragged under kills as many as 100,000 of the birds each year, but another peril is also claiming their lives and in fact killing more than a million seabirds a year.

The North Pacific Gyre: deadly plastic debris soup

Last year, the Globe and Mail ran an excellent article, A Sea of Synthetic Trash by Unnati Gandhi, on the horror of the North Pacific Gyre, a 26-million-square-kilometer plastic debris soup estimated to span an area 1 and ½ times the size of the continental U.S.A.

For the past 60 years, our discarded water bottles and plastic junk have been collecting in this slow moving vortex. While some of it was cargo dumped or lost off boats, much of it comes from land, from municipal water systems that make it out to the ocean.

Since plastic doesn’t biodegrade but instead breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, it is being ingested by fish, marine mammals and seabirds.

Excerpt from the Globe article
“The United Nations Environment Program says plastic accounts for the deaths of more than a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals every year. Countless fish, it says, die either from mistakenly eating the plastic or from becoming entangled in it and drowning.”

Seabird species also dying in scores include albatrosses and fulmars.

A Dutch study of fulmars in the North Sea found 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs. More than 1,600 pieces of plastic were found in the stomach of a bird in Belgium.

In a stark image of the durability of plastic, one piece found in the stomach of an albatross last year bore a serial number that was traced to a Second World War seaplane shot down in 1944.”

I found this shocking photo of a dead and decomposed albatross and the contents of its body is nothing but bits of plastic debris, bottle lids, junk. And once the bird decomposes, the same junk goes back out there quite possibly to be ingested again.

About the plight of the albatross, the Globe article quotes a Dr. Safina, President and Co-Founder of the Blue Ocean Institute: “There’s almost nothing else I can think of where the parents work so hard, so exhaustively, for so long to raise the next generation. And then you see the chick that’s five, 5 1/2 months old, almost ready to fly, but it’s dead. And the carcass is starting to rot, and right through the rib cage you see that this bird – that is on an island in the middle of the ocean – is packed with cigarette lighters.”

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