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November 30, 2007
Rescuing Turkish shipwreck
Turkish Daily News
A survey and inventory was undertaken for the first time in the area where the frigate sank and a detailed map was prepared as the first phase of the project. In the second stage, the frigate will be completely lifted to the surface
The Culture and Tourism Ministry will support a project aimed at bringing the Turkish frigate Ertuğrul, which sank off the coast of Japan in 1890 in a severe typhoon, to the surface.
The voyage of the Ertuğrul was planned as a goodwill trip to Japan in response to a Japanese delegation visit in 1887. However, the Ertuğrul sank on Sept. 15, 1890 on its way back from Japan on the rocks of Kashinozaki, off the coast of Ooshima Island. A total of 533 sailors died in the accident and the Japanese rescued 69.
A survey and inventory was undertaken for the first time in the area where the warship sank and a detailed map was prepared as the first phase of the project. In the second stage, the ship will be completely brought to the surface and exhibited in the museum next to the “Ertuğrul Monument” built on the coast.
A team of well-known nautical archaeologists from Turkey, Spain, Japan, and the United States will carry out the underwater excavation as part of the second phase of the project.
Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay will join a Japanese princess in a trip to the area where the ship sank and where divers will be operating. The dives will kick off in January and will last around a month-and-a-half.
The project is being carried out with contributions from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Bodrum (INA), the Yapı Kredi Retirement Partnership, the Turkish Foundation of Nautical Archaeology and Turkish Airlines (THY).
A meeting with history:
Artifacts unearthed during the underwater surveys were taken to a conservation area and further underwater excavations will be held from Jan. 9 to Feb. 18, said project coordinator, Tufan Turanlı. Huge rocks that now cover the frigate because of earthquakes and tides will be removed, he said.
“We plan to reach the ammunition store section and administrative rooms of the ship,” Turanlı said.
“We could come across some unexpected artifacts with the archaeological excavations, which will be conducted for first the time. Some of the findings and personal belongings of the frigate's commanders and crew will be displayed in a museum in Japan, while some will be brought to Bodrum for conservation works and display,” he said.
New documents and photographs of the historical event were also collected from relatives of the shipwreck's crew.
Project leaders invited Günay and State Minister Kürşat Tüzmen to Japan to join the dives and the invitation was accepted.
“They will dive to the shipwreck with a Japanese princess. Günay said the ministry will provide all its support to the project,” Turanlı said.
The project will shed light on Turkish history and revive the memories of 530 sailors who lost their lives in the tragic accident, said Giray Velioğlu of the Yapı Kredi Retirement Partnership. A documentary film in three languages (Turkish, English and Japanese) will also be shot as part of the project.
About the Ertuğrul Frigate accident:
The frigate Ertuğrul was sent by Sultan Abdülhamit II to the emperor of Japan on a goodwill visit. The frigate set sail on July 14, 1889 and, after sailing for more than a year, arrived in Japan in June 1890. On the return voyage, the Ottoman frigate sank on the 16th day on the rocks of Kashinozaki off the coast of Ooshima Island because of a severe typhoon. The tragedy resulted in the loss of 533 sailors, of whom 50 were officers. Only six officers and 63 sailors survived.
There now stands in Ooshima, Wakayama Prefecture, near a lighthouse, the Ertuğrul Monument, built in memory of those pioneers of Turkish-Japanese friendship. The compassion demonstrated by the Japanese people in saving and returning the survivors of the crew of the Ertuğrul to Istanbul has left a lasting memory of gratitude in the minds of the Turkish people. Thus, this tragic accident became a solemn symbol of friendship between the two nations.
Posted by victoria at 02:57 PM
November 29, 2007
Clive Cussler's -The Chase - The Limited Edition Prints!!!
Maurizio Manzieri is a professional artist living in Turin, Italy. Since 1994 he has been collaborating with leading publishers and magazines such as Mondadori, Editrice Nord, Rizzoli, Longanesi, TEA, Fanucci, Dario Flaccovio Editore, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (USA), Interzone (UK). His artwork has appeared in many international exhibits and renowned annuals including Spectrum, The Best in Fantastic Contemporary Art. Among the most prestigious awards conquered in the fantastic field there are: the Italia Award and the Europe Award - both as Best Illustrator -and the Chesley Award for Best Unpublished Monochrome Artwork.
YOU CAN PRE-ORDER NOW!
PRINTS SHIPMENT WILL BEGIN IN A FEW DAYS!!!
THE CHASE novel will be on sale on November 6th! I've just received the following note from the Penguin Art Department:
" Maurizio, we will send finish printed samples of THE CHASE soon. They just came in. Looks terrific."
As you can imagine, I look forward to my copy of the book, yet at the moment we have to compensate our thirst only with the artistic output. My Studio is practically ready to ship the brand-new production and the quickest Collectors will be able to grab one copy well before the volume hits the shops.
Take a glance at the revamped Cussler Store! It keeps slowly expanding while my collaborations go on! If you click on the images, you will be teleported straight away to the Prints page. Message to the buyers: please free to inquire about anything, from the packaging to the methods of shipments even though I'm pleased to assure you that each one of the Deluxe Prints will reach your door safe and sound!
(click on the below images if you wish to be teleported to the Store)
Price: EURO 45,00
Price: EURO 45,00
Each print comes numbered and hand signed on high quality Archival Matte Paper. Thanks to the special Ultrachrome pigment inks - water and smudge resistant -,each illustration delivers superb color expression and long lasting light fastness up to 75 years.The Artworks are shipped worldwide by Prioritaire Registered Post.
Posted by victoria at 01:34 PM
China to house shipwreck in underwater museum
China is building a giant underwater museum to preserve and exhibit an ancient shipwreck. The museum, the first of its kind in the world, is to contain a sunken ship more than 800 years old and its treasures.
Archaeologists say the ship is China’s most exciting underwater excavation. Named the Southern Sea Number One, it lies under 24 metres of water and two metres of sand and soil.
Archaeologists took more than 6,000 treasures from one small room on the ship in 2002. The Guangdong provincial government has now allocated £10 million to building a five hall underwater museum to preserve the wreck.
“We’ve estimated the ship to contain a total of 60,000 to 80,000 pieces of treasure,” says Wei Jun, director of the Guangdong Province Underwater Archeology Institute.
“Since the ship and its treasures have become accustomed to being underwater, it’s better to keep them there.” Experts say the ship may break up if it is exposed to air so they plan to put it into a 5,000 tonne steel container and then transport it into into the underwater museum. Construction work on the museum is well underway and it is expected to open to the public by the middle of next year. ananova
Posted by victoria at 11:34 AM
Protecting history in Great Lakes
By Sen. Carl Levin
WASHINGTON — Since the time glaciers receded leaving our pleasant peninsulas, the Great Lakes have shaped Michigan. And physical boundaries are only the beginning. From the Native Americans who lived around and explored the lakes and adjacent land, to the European settlers who developed trading routes for furs, then lumber, and eventually automobiles that Michigan shipped around the world, the Great Lakes hold the story of Michigan’s history. One part of that story is being preserved at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and earlier this month I introduced legislation to expand that sanctuary.
Thunder Bay has been a regular byway for ships traveling on Lake Huron, and it earned the name “Shipwreck Alley” because the geography and weather patterns in the bay led to over 300 shipwrecks. Thanks to a partnership established in 2000 between the State of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary protects the wreckage of 116 ships. It includes 448 square miles of water and 115 miles of shoreline.
The cold temperature and fresh water of Lake Huron have preserved many of the shipwreck sites, creating an underwater museum of maritime history. The shipwrecks span the 19th and 20th centuries and cover a wide variety of ship types and cargo, providing a wealth of information to researchers and students. The sanctuary is an unparalleled treasure for divers and snorklers.
In 2005, NOAA opened the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena, an educational station and visitors’ center that traces maritime history in the Great Lakes. Families, school groups and history buffs can even explore the shipwrecks by live video feeds from divers in the sanctuary, extending the reach of the vast educational opportunities in the sanctuary not only to large numbers of visitors each year, but to people around the country who visit the other 13 NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries.
These shipwrecks are a piece of history that must be carefully protected. NOAA initially proposed that the sanctuary cover an area twice as big as was established in 2000, but the proposal had to be scaled back to address concerns raised by some in the local community. Now, community leaders and residents agree that it is time to expand the sanctuary.
Under my proposal, the new sanctuary boundaries would include the historic site of one of the most intact shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, the Cornelia B. Windiate. This three-mast schooner sank in 1875 while delivering wheat from Milwaukee to Buffalo. The expanded sanctuary would also include the H.P. Bridge, a three-mast wooden ship that sank with a payload of pottery, clothing, ship tackle and hardware, all preserved since it sank in 1869. In total, the expansion would include 3,722 square miles of water, 226 miles of shoreline and an estimated 178 additional shipwrecks, although many shipwreck sites remain unexplored.
As we work to preserve this piece of history in the Great Lakes, we have also recently made major progress to protect the Great Lakes as a whole and to ensure that commercial navigation channels are maintained. Overriding a presidential veto, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act earlier this month. The law will help our fight to stop invasive species like Asian carp from entering the Great lakes, to address the dredging backlog that impacts shipping channels and harbors, to prevent sewage systems from overflowing into Michigan lakes and rivers, and to move forward on studies and programs to protect the Great Lakes environment and ecosystem.
By protecting “Shipwreck Alley” and expanding the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, we can preserve a special chapter in the history of the Great Lakes. And by continuing to fight to make the Great Lakes safe and clean for the use and enjoyment of future generations, I hope that we can write another successful, prosperous chapter for Michigan’s people and for our Great Lakes.
Carl Levin, a Democrat, represents Michigan in the U.S. Senate.
Posted by victoria at 10:39 AM
November 27, 2007
Winners of Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1
The Four Grand prize winners of Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1 signed by Mike and Warren Fletcher are:
Nicholas Piscitelli
Philadelphia, PA
Nicole Austin
Seymour, Australia
Douglas Armstrong
Exeter, ON
Vic Sauve
Sudbury, Ont
Your DVD sets are on the way!
Don't forget you can still buy Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1 in the Shipwreck Central online shop.
Check back soon for exclusive clips from Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 2
Posted by victoria at 10:02 AM
November 26, 2007
Shark circles schoolgirls stranded on shipwreck
Two teenage girls were stranded on a shipwreck as a shark circled them at Byron Bay on the northern New South Wales coast.
The girls, named by the Northern Star newspaper as Byron Bay High School students Jett Coates and Caitlin Robinson, both 14, were diving off the wreck yesterday when one of them spotted the "large dark shark".
"I was just about to jump off and Jett yelled 'Watch out. There's a shark.'," Caitlin told the paper.
"We couldn't see it for a while, then it came under us again."
Northern NSW lifeguard co-ordinator Stephen Leahy said the alarm was raised early yesterday.
Two surf lifesavers in an inflatable boat went to the wreck, about 100m west of the surf club on Byron Bay's main beach, to save the girls.
"Apart from being very scared they were not injured," Mr Leahy said.
The beach was closed for a short time while lifesavers looked for the shark, but it was not seen again.
"There have been nine sightings of sharks in the Byron Bay area in the last two weeks," Mr Leahy said.
"It's unusual in that these sharks are close to swimmers, that definitely concerns us."
Yesterday's incident follows last month's attack on a woman who was knocked from her sea kayak by a shark near Byron Bay.
The woman was bitten on the arm.
Posted by victoria at 11:06 AM
November 23, 2007
Ship Sinking in Antarctic Waters
Antarctic cruise liner hits iceberg, ships rescue 150
SANTIAGO (AFP) — A cruise liner hit an iceberg off Antarctica on Friday and other ships rushed to rescue more than 150 people who took to the freezing seas in lifeboats, officials said.
The 100 passengers and most of the 54 crew from the MS Explorer were picked up safely after the Titanic-style accident near the South Shetland islands, officials from international coastguard and navy services said.
The captain and another senior officer stayed on board the Liberian-registered Explorer but it was not immediately known if it was sinking, the officials said. But problems with the ship's safety record were immediately highlighted.
Susan Hayes, vice president of marketing for Gap Adventures, which ran the tour, said the rescued passengers and crew were transferred to another ship which is in the area. "Everyone is safe and accounted for at this point," she told CNN television.
The 2,400 tonne Explorer began taking in water after it struck ice, she said. Although its pumps were managing the water, a decision was made to evacuate the passengers into life boats, she added.
A Chilean navy captain, Rodrigo Vattuone, told CNN a distress signal was raised at 12:54 am local time (0354 GMT). The ship was near King George Island, where Chile has its Teniente Marsh base.
The Chilean icebreaker Oscar Viel was on its way to the ship to help the rescue operation, Vattuone said.
The accident and ensuing operation was monitored by coast guard services in several countries.
A British coastguard spokesman, Fred Caygill, said another cruise liner, the Endeavour had taken on passengers. "All persons are accounted for," he told Britain's Sky News television.
The owners of a Norwegian vessel, the MS Nordnorge, said it had also taken on a large number. Stein Lillebo, spokesman for Hurtigruten, owners of the Nordnorge, told AFP only the officers from the Explorer were still on board the stricken ship.
"It's too early to say at this stage whether it will actually sink...but it is taking some ingress of water," Caygill said. Another spokesman earlier said the ship was listing at 25 degrees.
Weather in the area is relatively good, with the Antarctic heading from late spring into summer. The average temperature is about minus five degrees Celsius (23 Fahrenheit), Caygill said.
Cruise ships regularly take passengers to the remote region to view icebergs and other Antarctic natural features at this time of year.
But the specialist Lloyds List maritime publication said the Explorer had five "deficiencies" at its last inspection including problems with a watertight door.
The ship also had lifeboat maintenance problems and missing search and rescue plans, according to a report on Lloyds' website.
Watertight doors were described as "not as required," and the fire safety measures were also criticized, it said, citing an inspection done by Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency in May this year.
Chilean port inspectors also found six deficiencies during an inspection in Puerto Natales in March, including two related to navigation matters, it said.
In August, 17 British tourists and a Russian sailor were injured when a cruise ship, the Aleksey Maryshev, was hit by falling pieces of iceshelf in the Arctic.
It was carrying nearly 50 passengers and 19 crew at the time.
Posted by victoria at 09:04 AM
November 22, 2007
Divers Cleared to Dive Canterbury Wreck
Canterbury will ultimately become a link in the Northland Dive Trail, a chain of sunken ships reaching from Tutukaka to the Cavalli Islands. Northernmost of these is the former Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior.
The Bay of Islands Canterbury Trust declared the former naval frigate sunk near Cape Brett on November 3rd safe to dive. She sits in 30 meters of water at Deep Water Cove. Marine life is already moving in!
A Truly World Class Location
The Canterbury promises to be one of New Zealand's top dive sites according to expert divers from the area. Deep Water Cove is a feature of the Cape Brett Peninsula, which forms the southern arm of the Bay of Islands. The site is favored by marine experts because of its sheltered aspect, flat sandy bottom and relative lack of tidal currents.
Underwater visibility at Deep Water Cove can be as much as 60 meters. Visibility at other popular dive sites in the area is low compared to Deep Water Cove. It has the makings of a first-class dive site with the advantage that the Canterbury can be enjoyed by less advanced divers. She is even visible to snorkelers at a depth of 5 meters!...
A Bit of History
The approved sinking location at Manawahuna (Deep Water Cove) is in the shadow of Rakaumangamanga, one of the sacred mountains of Ngapuhi. For this reason it has deep spiritual and cultural significance, particularly for its guardians, the Patukeha and Ngati Kuta hapu of Te Rawhiti. The English name for Manawahuna is Deep Water Cove, made famous by the American fisherman, Zane Grey in the 1920's. There was a fishing lodge at the Cove for many years.
Dive Status
Navy divers cleared the Canterbury declaring her safe to dive. Caution is advised due to a few boards covering holes and detonation cable that have yet to be removed from some areas. Non-commercial dive vessels are invited to dive the wreck free of charge. However, all commercial operators must pay a fee to help cover the enormous outstanding debt incurred despite a very efficient scuttling operation. All divers are asked to follow the code of conduct available for download at the Canterbury Trust website.
Stay Informed
Auckland diver Paul Morris told the press he believes the Canterbury will become one of New Zealand's top dive sites because of its sheletered location and crystal clear waters. He will post images on his web site, www.diveplanet.co.nz, which provides information about Northland's dive sites and wrecks. Morris promises to post updates to show the sea creatures moving into this new home!
The Canterbury Trust has created a very informative website with mapping of the wreck dimensions, sonar images, rules of conduct, and much more. To learn about this exciting new dive site, visit: Dive the HMNZS Canterbury
Sources: Canterbury Charitable Trust; Stuff NZ
sonar image depicting the Canterbury bolt upright on the ocen floor.
Images courtesy of Electronic Navigation Ltd (Auckland) 09 373 5595 using WASSP sonar
Posted by victoria at 09:31 AM
Key to Great Lakes history; Preservation
The Great Lakes hold the story of Michigan's history. One part of that story is being preserved at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Earlier this month, I introduced legislation to expand it.
Thunder Bay has been a regular byway for ships traveling on Lake Huron, and it earned the name "Shipwreck Alley" because the geography and weather patterns in the bay led to more than 300 shipwrecks.
Thanks to a partnership established in 2000 between the state of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary protects the wreckage of 116 ships. It includes 448 square miles of water and 115 miles of shoreline.
In 2005, NOAA opened the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena, an educational station and visitors' center that traces maritime history in the Great Lakes. Families, school groups and history buffs can explore the shipwrecks by live video feeds from divers in the sanctuary, extending the reach of the vast educational opportunities in the sanctuary not only to large numbers of visitors each year, but to people around the country who visit the other 13 NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries.
These shipwrecks are a piece of history that must be carefully protected. NOAA initially proposed that the sanctuary cover an area twice as big as was established in 2000, but the proposal had to be scaled back to address concerns raised by some in the local community. Now, community leaders and residents agree that it is time to expand the sanctuary.
Under my proposal, the new sanctuary boundaries would include the historic site of one of the most intact shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, the Cornelia B. Windiate. This three-mast schooner sank in 1875 while delivering wheat from Milwaukee to Buffalo.
The expanded sanctuary also would include the H.P. Bridge, a three-mast wooden ship that sank with a payload of pottery, clothing, ship tackle and hardware, all preserved since it sank in 1869. In total, the expansion would include 3,722 square miles of water, 226 miles of shoreline and about 178 additional shipwrecks. Many shipwreck sites remain unexplored.
As we work to preserve this piece of history in the Great Lakes, we also have made major progress to protect the Great Lakes as a whole and to ensure that commercial navigation channels are maintained. Overriding a presidential veto, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act earlier this month.
The law will help us fight to stop invasive species such as Asian carp from entering the Great lakes, to address the dredging backlog that impacts shipping channels and harbors, to prevent sewage systems from overflowing into Michigan lakes and rivers, and to move forward on studies and programs to protect the Great Lakes environment and ecosystem.
By protecting "Shipwreck Alley" and expanding the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, we can preserve a special chapter in the history of the Great Lakes. And by continuing to fight to make the Great Lakes safe and clean for the use and enjoyment of future generations, I hope that we can write another successful, prosperous chapter for Michigan's people and for our Great Lakes.
Carl Levin is the senior U.S. senator from Michigan. Write him at: Russell Senate Office Building Room SR-269, Washington, D.C. 20510; call him at: (202) 224-6221; or e-mail him at: senator@levin.senate.gov.
Posted by victoria at 09:26 AM
November 20, 2007
Possible shipwreck found in Ocean Shores, Washinton
By GLENN FARLEY / KING 5 News
Mystery washes up at Ocean Shores
OCEAN SHORES, Wash. – A mystery has washed up on the beaches of Ocean Shores – a possible shipwreck.
Everyday, Steve Sauve takes a drive along the beach. And he's found all sorts of stuff, but nothing like what he's uncovered now.
From a distance, he thought it was just a piece of an old dock. It showed up after a violent storm last week.
He estimates it could come from the 1880's, or even earlier.
Washington has seen hundreds of shipwrecks off its coast, from early explorers to modern days. They ran from the exotic to the mundane. Many were lumber ships heading in and out of Grays Harbor.
(A piece of a possible shipwreck found in Ocean Shores, Wash.)
Looking at the wreckage, you can see the big timbers held together with large wooden pins and iron or possibly steel rods.
Ocean Shores' Museum and Interpretive Center will take over the find, protect it, and try and find out just what ship the piece came from.
The Museum's director says he'll consult with marine historians and naval architects. Historic drawings and how the piece was put together should be able to narrow down the time frame as to just how old this ship is, if it is in fact, a ship.
"You find buoys from China, and different types of rocks here. But, something like this -- to find this is amazing," said Sauve.
If you are an expert on old shipwrecks, please leave a message with the Ocean Shores Interpretive Center at 360-289-4617.
Posted by victoria at 10:19 AM
November 15, 2007
Moonlighting: Clive Cussler
The bestselling novelist talks about his other passion in life: searching for shipwrecks with his organization, NUMA.
from the November 09, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1109/p14s05-algn.html
I was in the service and stationed out in the Pacific during the Korean War. I got really into diving. [In 1951], a friend and I sent for a tank and regulator and the only place, then, you could buy it from was through [Jacques] Cousteau in France. Everybody laughed and said, "It has to be the first tank and regulator – Scuba – in the Pacific." So that's where it all started with me.
It wasn't until much later that I got interested in searching for shipwrecks. We found an old anchor off Catalina Island years ago. My buddies and I raised it and it's sitting now in a little maritime museum at Cabrillo Beach [Calif.]. That got me interested in shipwrecks. The first big expedition I funded was for the Bonhomme Richard, the John Paul Jones ship in the North Sea off Scarborough, England. We didn't find it and I've looked six times since then and haven't found it yet but I'm going to give up. Shipwrecks are never found until they want to be found. And when they are found, they're never where they're supposed to be.
Back in 1979, when we were looking for the Richard, there was an attorney on board from Texas who said, "You know, if you're going to do this, you should form a nonprofit foundation." So they said, "We'll call it the Clive Cussler Foundation." I said, "No, no, no. I've got an ego, but it's not that big." So then they thought it would be great fun to call it NUMA [The National Underwater and Marine Agency] out of [my] books. For a few years, I failed pretty miserably and then we kind of got the hang of it. We've failed more often than not, but we've had some pretty good successes, like the Confederate submarine Hunley, which we raised, and then the Carpathia [the ship that rescued survivors of the Titanic] was a favorite. You know, they made such a big deal about [Robert] Ballard and the Titanic, and [James] Cameron and the movie, so I thought, "what about the Carpathia?" I researched it and found out it had been torpedoed off Ireland in World War I. So it took us three attempts before the crew found it. And the Marie Celeste, the famous ghost ship, and others like that. Everyone thinks NUMA is in a big building with employees but it's just me sitting here at the desk when I do research on a wreck and figure there's a fighting chance to find it. Then I call a crew that handles the equipment ... and we start searching. My son [Dirk] is president, he handles a lot of the details for me. I'm going to Panama in February to search for a ship called the Roosevelt. It was the ship that Admiral [Robert] Peary used in his North Pole expeditions. It sailed for, oh, another 30 years and it was too far gone to do any repair. They just ran it into a swamp where the French were working on the canal, so it's down there somewhere. Someone jokingly said, "Why don't you find a shipwreck in Arizona, in the desert?" So, just for fun, I found out that a ship called the Uncle Sam, a tugboat they brought down from San Francisco – it was the first steamboat on the Colorado river – sank three years later. So that's always been one that, some day, I'd like to go search for.
I was always a Civil War buff. When my parents went to town on a Saturday night, they would always leave me at the library. And I got hooked on a boys series about the Civil War by two brothers – one was a Confederate and the other was a Yankee. That perked my interest and then I started reading books on the Civil War. I then concentrated on the maritime end of it. We found three Confederate Ironclads. We found three Confederate Union Ironclads in Charleston, [N.C.], and then The Cumberland, which the Merrimac sank, we found that. The Hunley, it turned out, wasn't on its way back to the shore when it went down. It didn't go down in an explosion. They were sitting there waiting for the tide to turn. It looks as if they were struck by a ship coming to save the Housatonic survivors [The Hunley sank the USS Housatonic by torpedo]. If we find something I just make an announcement and we do an archaeological report and we just move on to the next one. I've never made a big thing of it. My accountant thinks I belong in a rubber room under restraint because there's no profit in this, and we've never kept an artifact, and I've never looked for treasure. It's a fascinating pastime and I figure, at the most, every once in a while in a history book, I'll be a footnote.
• Clive Cussler's 'The Chase' is now in stores. Read about the National Underwater and Marine Agency [NUMA] at www.numa.net
Posted by victoria at 09:42 AM
Diving Turkey's Lycian Coast
Shipwrecks, Sunken City Lure Divers to Turkey's Lycian Coast
By Anna Jenkinson
Gripping the broken hull of the ``Duchess of York,'' a 19th-century steamer, I struggle with a dilemma -- do I swim further down into one of the best wrecks along the Turkish coast or heed my dive computer's warning that I am running out of time?
Decisions, decisions. The display on my wrist shows I must start to ascend within two minutes. I peer underneath and around the corner of the jagged metal, the portholes and railings of the smashed vessel easy to identify in the clear water. One minute. I desperately want to look at the shipwreck a little longer. Zero minutes.
I recall the advice given to me before the dive: Resist the temptation to descend to the deepest parts of the wreck and for goodness sake keep an eye on your air. Reluctantly, I let go and begin my ascent, to be suddenly surrounded by a shoal of 30 or more, two-foot-long, amber-striped fish.
``You were lucky,'' said Ender, my guide, in the speedboat on the way back to the local town of Kalkan. ``No current, excellent visibility, and all those amberjack swimming around us.''
The ``Duchess of York'' was identified when the ship's bell was found, though the parts of the wreck I visited may have belonged to different vessels, local divers said -- testament to a coastline that has been devouring vessels for at least 3,300 years. History, warm waters and sunshine are attracting adventure seekers to the region, which is about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from the current political strife with Kurdish rebels.
Winding Road
Half an hour from Kalkan by local minibus, or dolmus, is the small coastal town of Kas (pronounced ``cash''), which I had made my base. The winding road hugged the rocky coastline, the turquoise sea dotted with islands on one side, the Taurus Mountains on the other.
This is the heart of ancient Lycia, ally of Troy in Homer's ``Iliad,'' whose citizens built tombs that can still be seen, carved into the cliff face, or dotted along the ``Lycian Way,'' a marked coastal footpath that stretches about 500 kilometers (310 miles).
``Lycia is practically an open-air museum,'' said archaeologist Ilhan Aksit in his book ``The Land of Light, Lycia.'' Avid hikers come to Turkey to walk the entire length of the trail. A two-hour stretch from Kas was enough for me.
After a secluded cove or two, countless olive trees and glorious views across the mountains and sea all to myself, I came to a steep descent, no wider than my feet. Clinging to the rock face and trying not to look down at the sheer drop to the sea, I began to think maybe it wouldn't be so bad to meet a fellow hiker.
I reached the bay below and celebrated with a dip in the sea before catching a boat back to Kas, quietly proud of my success. When a Turkish friend described my path that evening as ``fairly gentle,'' I consoled myself that I was unaccustomed to the heat.
Warm Water
The temperature hovered around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in October. Even the water was a pleasant surprise. As someone who has done most of her diving in tropical southeast Asia, the 26 degrees of this part of the Mediterranean, visibility as far as 40 meters and abundant marine life were a world away from my current home in Brussels.
At Besmi Adasi, a short boat trip from Kas's harbor, a mass of tiny silver fish darted to and fro, glinting like a sheet of glass in the sun's rays. Around them, dozens of tuna hunted for a mid-morning snack. Sea urchins, worm cucumbers and featherstars clung to rocky outcrops below, while barracuda, jacks and trumpetfish all came out to play.
``Now that's my type of diving!'' said one holidaymaker, a qualified diving instructor, as she got back on the boat and was handed the customary post-dive glass of Turkish tea.
Ancient Trashyard
Her group had seen amphora strewn on the seabed and a turtle, both of which I was to meet later in the week. Little in the underwater world beats quietly finning next to a turtle as it glides along, propelled by its front flippers. In Turkey, rubbish can come a close second, though.
Around Kas, the seabed is what one local diver called a ``trashyard for the ancient people.'' I saw tall, slender storage jars, some firmly embedded into the rock. While many of the seabed objects are of limited interest to archaeologists, now and then, pieces of much greater value come to light.
In 1982, at Uluburun near Kas, a bronze-age ship was discovered together with a cargo of copper ingots. Egyptian ebony logs, the earliest known intact ingots of glass, Cypriot ceramics, Canaanite jewelry and bronze tools were all excavated, according to the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
The original 14th-century B.C. shipwreck is now housed in the Underwater Archaeology Museum down the coast in Bodrum. Still, two replicas were made, one of which was sunk last year in Kas as part of a new Underwater Archaeology Park, a tourist attraction and training ground.
Sunken City
Some underwater sites are so sensitive, they are off limits to divers. To see the partially submerged city of Kekova, I took a sea kayak. You need calm water and good eyesight to see the sunken walls that date back 2,000 years, before earthquakes destroyed the city. Many structures though are still above the surface -- steps of ancient houses eerily descending into the water, tops of buildings with square grooves to support long-vanished beams.
Kas, about 2.5 hours drive from the airport at Dalaman or 3.5 hours from Antalya, is also a center for other outdoor sports, including canyoning, mountain-biking and paragliding.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of ways to relax after the exertion, be it a poolside dinner against a backdrop of bougainvillea and pomegranate trees, a visit to the Turkish baths or an afternoon game of backgammon in a local cafe.
As I sat in the back garden of a Turkish home on my last evening, the scent of jasmine in the air and a chilled Efes beer in my hand, I started to plan my return.
Kalkan Dive Centre does one-day dive trips including the ``Duchess of York'' for 40 euros ($58) per person. BT adventure & diving and Dragoman run dive trips from Kas.
(Anna Jenkinson writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Anna Jenkinson in Kas, Turkey, at ajenkinson@bloomberg.net
Posted by victoria at 09:35 AM
November 13, 2007
Our World Underwater Scholarship Society
North American Rolex Scholarship – 2008 - Application Deadline December 31, 2007.
European Rolex Scholarship – 2008 - Application Deadline December 31, 2007.
Australasia Rolex Scholarship – 2008 - Application Deadline December 31, 2007.
OWU Summer Internships – 2008 Application deadline is January 31, 2008.
For more than 35 years, Our World Underwater Scholarship Society has created invaluable opportunities for its young scholars and interns to pursue careers related to the underwater world. We provide experience-based scholarships and internships with renowned marine and freshwater experts throughout the world.
With decades of generous and unwavering support from volunteers and sponsors like Rolex, Our World Underwater Scholarship Society has seen its scholars and interns make lasting contributions to the underwater world. In fact, the vast majority of former scholars and interns are still working in underwater-related fields.
If you are a student, we invite you to learn more about the society’s internships and scholarships. You can download applications right here on our site.
If you are a potential volunteer or sponsor, we encourage you to explore our site and to contact us regarding a contribution. Our World Underwater Scholarship Society has been successful because people like you have demonstrated that they care about our vital marine and freshwater environments.
Posted by victoria at 03:31 PM
Ancient Salad Dressing Found in Jars at Bottom of Mediterranean
By Charles Q. Choi
Genetic analysis has revealed the contents of an ancient shipwreck dating back to the era of the Roman Republic and Athenian Empire. The cargo was olive oil flavored with oregano.
Beyond discovering ingredients for Italian salad dressing on the sea floor, such research could provide a wealth of insights concerning the everyday life of ancient seafaring civilizations that would otherwise be lost at sea.
An international team of U.S. and Greek researchers investigated the remains of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck that lies 230 feet (70 meters) deep, roughly a half-mile (1 kilometer) off the coast of the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean Sea.
The shipwreck's contents, revealed in early 2006, has now been more fully analyzed. By deploying a robot to the wreck to collect two amphoras — two-handled earthenware jars often used by ancient Greeks and Romans — they were able to obtain DNA samples by scraping the insides of the ceramics.
Many archeologists specialize in the analysis of amphoras, which were used for shipping wine, oil, spices, grapes, olives, grain, nuts, fish and other commodities.
Amphoras in a shipwreck can often reveal the age and nationality of the wreck, and at times they even hold their original contents, shedding light on ancient trade across the Mediterranean.
The study of amphoras can also be frustrating.
After centuries underwater, their contents have usually been washed away and researchers are "just left with empty bottles," said researcher Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist and historian of technology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who helped lead a 2005 expedition that explored and recovered two amphoras from the Chios wreck.
Foley and his colleagues identified the DNA contents of one amphora as olives and oregano, suggesting it held olive oil mixed with oregano, they announced recently.
This came as a surprise, since Chios was well known as a major exporter of fine wines in antiquity, and archeologists had assumed that any cargo from that area would have been wine.
The other amphora the researchers analyzed may indeed have contained wine, although the DNA evidence they found there as yet remains uncertain.
"This is the first time that we've taken a jar like this that had no visible remains in it and known for sure what was in it," Foley told LiveScience.
The amphora that held the oregano-flavored oil was of a style distinct to Chios. That style made up roughly two-thirds of the more than 350 amphoras found on the wreck, suggesting the ship had sunk while outbound from the island, possibly due to strong fluke winds common near there.
"The fact that we detected DNA of olives may mean that Chios exported more than wine," Foley said. "Their agricultural production might have been more sophisticated than we've suspected."
The oregano may have done more than just flavor the oil.
"If you go up into the hills of Greece today, the older generation of women know that adding oregano, thyme or sage not just flavors the oil, but helps preserve it longer," Foley said.
The ancient Greeks may have used herbs — and the antioxidants in them — to intentionally help preserve the oil, and possibly accidentally helped preserve the DNA the researchers sampled more than two millennia later.
If the researchers' technique works on other containers, "we can begin to trace the agricultural production of different regions through time and their trading networks," Foley said. "We can see what crops were grown where and when, and this will give us an entirely new look at the ancient economy. We can see what they were growing, what they were eating and how they prepared and preserved foods."
Such insights into ancient crops could even yield insights into the climate of that period.
The technique used to analyze ancient cargo DNA has its limits, the scientists stressed.
For instance, it probably cannot reliably identify fish products, since any evidence of that could be contamination from the marine environment.
It also remains to be seen whether this method can be used on amphoras stored in museums for years, whether it works on ceramics excavated from land sites, or whether it will only work on amphoras freshly salvaged from the ocean.
The scientists hope to go back and study a few dozen more amphoras from a variety of wrecks next year.
Foley and his colleague Maria Hansson at Lund University in Sweden will detail their current findings in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archeological Science.
Posted by victoria at 11:19 AM
November 11, 2007
November 11th
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
— John McCrae
Lest we forget.
Posted by victoria at 10:38 AM
November 08, 2007
Side Scan Sonar Training
Side Scan Sonar Training -3 Day Intensive Course - Annapolis, Maryland
Dates: Feb 26-28, 2008
Instructor: Vincent J. Capone, M.Sc.
Guest Lecturer: John Gann, Chesapeake Technologies
Sonar expert, Vince Capone, M.Sc. will conduct an intensive 3 day side scan sonar training course in Annapolis MD. The course jointly sponsored by International Industries and Black Laser Learning shall start with basic terminology and principles then move into the more sophisticated analysis techniques. You will learn how to analyze sonar records, set survey parameters, as well as process the data.
The course is non manufacturer specific with examples from many different types of sonars. In addition to general sonar record analysis, the course will also have several sections devoted to specific topics including:
Shallow Water Operations
Small Target Search OPS
Crime Scene/Accident Mapping
Aircraft Search OPS
Search Patterns-Range/Overlap
Locating Sunken Automobiles
Victim Search OPS
In addition to the above topics time will be allocated for customer specific discussions. We can tackle your specific use of sonar and how to get the best performance from your system as well as conduct the best operation for your application. A complete syllabus will be available in the near future.
About the Instructor
Vince has been conducting side scan sonar operations for over twenty years using all types of sonars in water depths from a few feet to over 11,000. He is a sonar instructor for various units in the US Navy as well as allied foreign forces. After the shuttle Columbia crash, he was part of the team of sonar specialists brought in to search two reservoirs in Texas. He has found hundreds of shipwrecks including the U-215 and America's oldest intact warship the Lake George Radeau.
Registration:
Contact International Industries 410-349-4080
Black Laser Learning
www.blacklaserlearning.com
Posted by victoria at 10:54 AM
November 07, 2007
Carpathia surveyed
A British-led team of technical divers has successfully completed a survey of the Titanic’s rescue ship, the Carpathia, which lies at 160m in the north Atlantic. The team, led by Ric Waring and including Rich Stevenson and Jeff Cornish, penetrated the wreck situated 200 miles from the Irish Coast.
RMS Carpathia was on her way to the Mediterranean on the night of 14 April 1912 when it received the Titanic’s SOS call. Negotiating 58 miles of iceberg-strewn water, the liner recovered 712 survivors. Six years later a German U-boat sank her.
The wreck was first found by the famous author and adventurer Clive Cussler in 1999, however, because it lies 200 miles from the nearest land and lies at depths of more than 150m, only a few dives have been completed at the site.
Technical divers Rich Stevenson, Ric Waring, Zaid Al-Obaidi and Bruce Dunton carried out a short dive in 2001. Bad weather prevented further exploration by the team and hampered two following attempts until now. Using rebreathers the ten-strong team comprised of British, Italian and German divers dived the site for six days.
‘We did a total of six days diving on the wreck with both teams doing three dives each,’ said Waring. ‘Bottom times ranged from 20 to 27 minutes, with total in water times of between four and a half and six hours. All divers used rebreathers as the logistics to conduct an expedition on open circuit would be impractical, not only carrying the gas on the dive, but also carrying enough gas on the boat.’
He added: ‘The wreck has seen better days and after 95 years under water is in an advanced state of collapse.’ According to the team, the wreck stands upright, however, its deteriorating condition made it difficult to identity particular sections.
‘Visibility on the wreck was fantastic albeit it slightly dark,’ explained Stevenson. ‘You can see without lights and can clearly see divers 30m away, although we used powerful torches on the dive. There is crockery strewn all over the place and lots of artefacts, such as gauges, portholes, sinks and even three toilets in a row are plainly visible.’
While Waring’s team was diving the Carpathia in August this year, the owners of the wreck, Titanic INC, were conducting surveys using remotely operated vehicles (ROV).
‘We were buzzed a couple of times by the ROV from Titanic INC as it carried on its survey work and its recovery of artefacts for the forthcoming Titanic exhibition. It only stopped when it came over to film us,’ said Cornish. ‘As the Titanic INC team was out there at the same time as us, we handed over the crockery we had found and also the double-headed telegraph as soon as we had raised them.’
Cornish believes that the expedition is the first to be conducted by a sport diving team so far from shore and so deep. ‘I guess we have conducted the deepest, independently verified [by ROV] wreck dive in the world,’ said Cornish.
The Titanic INC exhibition is expected in the UK in 2008 following restoration of the Carpathia exhibits. For more information on the Carpathia expedition, see the dive team’s website www.provenvcts.com/carpathia/index.php.
Posted by victoria at 10:57 AM
November 06, 2007
WIN Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1
Please take some time this week to check out the clips in the feature video player from our dive off Juno Beach - one of the episodes included in this DVD set.
Sure you can easily buy your own copy of Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1 on DVD but these 4 sets are the only ones signed by both Mike and Warren Fletcher!
How can you win?
Click on the launch entry link below and fill out the form, include your Name, age, address, telephone number, email address and correctly answer the question then hit submit.
Once you have the correct answer you can enter once a day until the contest closes on November 20th.
Four Grand prize winners of Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters: Set 1 signed by Mike and Warren Fletcher will be drawn from all correct entries received before the contest deadline
Good Luck!
Check back for the winners!
Posted by victoria at 02:23 PM
November 05, 2007
DOXA BOOK WINNERS
Thanks to everyone who entered! Check back this week for a new contest!
Grand Prize Winners of the book DOXA SUB FORTY YEARS 1947- 2007 and an Orange Jenny logo ball cap are:
- John Cameron - Oxnard, Ca
- Glenn Douglas - Westminster, CO
The winners of an Orange Jenny Logo ball cap are:
- Michael Keels - Mount Pearl, Newfoundland
- Len Sussman - North Hills, CA
- Troy Vail - Loves Park, IL
- James Higbie - Humble, TX
- Christine Willaeys - Langton, Ontario
- Warren Bush - Peterborough, Ontario
- Karen Bradfield - Victoria, Australia
- Jamie Smith - Malahat, BC
Kudos to everyone who got the answer correct - for those who may have missed it the answer is:
Serial number 001/1000 is dedicated to Dr. Clive Cussler, famous US author well known for his popular Dirk Pitt® action-adventure novels, founder and chairman of the National Underwater & Marine Agency NUMA.
Serial number 001/3000 of the orange face DOXA SUB 600T Professional was sent to Dr. Clive Cussler in November 2003. Clive Cussler also received serial number 001/1000 of the SUB 300T Seahunter re-edition and 001/1000 of the SUB 300T Professional in May 2002
Posted by victoria at 10:49 AM
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg SegalA vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.
A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.
Captain Charles Moore Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.
“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.
This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about
Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. “We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”
Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.
At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.
Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.
This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.
In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.
Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted “new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.
It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.
On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.
As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.
This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.
“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
dead bird
Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.
Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.
The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.
The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”
Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”
Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.
It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."
jar of plastic pulled from ocean Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we? Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.
Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.
None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.
The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.
It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.
On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.
As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.
This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.
“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
dead bird
Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.
Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.
The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.
The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”
Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”
Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.
It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."
jar of plastic pulled from ocean Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we? Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.
Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.
None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.
The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.
© Copyright 2007 Best Life Magazine
Posted by victoria at 09:20 AM
