Collection Report Dec 29, 2010

Here at last, long-delayed. December 29, two days after the fabled "Christmas storm." Though the mid-Atlantic was hit hard, Maine saw an average -- even light -- nor'easter. I arrived at Bay View beach late morning, low tide, to this:

A long morning - kelp beds carry far more than kelp

This report will have limited commentary. The pictures are enough. Keep in mind, this is from tide line, a few hundred feet of beach in southern Maine, in 28 degrees F. The same stretch of beach I've cleaned fastidiously nearly every week since June.

First, "Zone N" - the northerly of the two sections I clean, closest to the public access, and more populated during the summer months.

341 finds:

• Building materials: 3
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3
• Fishing misc.: 75 (36 lobster claw bands, 14 bits of vinyl trap coating, lure, "Lunker Fishing" packet scrap, 1 webbed basket, sinker bead, 2 monofilaments, 19 bits of rope)
• Food-related plastics: 55 (11 scraps of #6 drinking cup, 17 bits of cutlery, 13 bottlecap seals, 1 "medium-well" steak tag, 2 bread tags, 11 misc.)
• Food-related metal/glass: 9 (7 can scraps, 2 bottle caps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 180 (you name it, it's there)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 1 (golf tee)
• Misc./unique: 14 (13 fabric scraps, 1 piece of cord)

Summer's fare, lurking offshore til the storm

Misc. confetti of modern life

Closeup of some misc. plastic

Shovels, pail bits, umbrella bases, etc.

Broken ruler helps size other flotsam

Whither the missing comb teeth?

Aluminum cans degrading

The cost of a robust fishing economy

Many bands had apparent bite marks

On to "Zone S" -- the southern zone, separated from Zone N by a private patio built out slightly onto the beach, and thus much quieter & less-traveled in summertime:

137 finds:

• Building materials: 1
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 21 (12 claw bands, 3 vinyl trap coating bits, 1 shotgun shell, 5 bits of rope)
• Food-related plastics: 15 (7 bottlecap seals, 3 bread wrapper tags, bottle cap, spoon, fork tine, 2 scraps of drinking cup)
• Food-related metal/glass: 9 (can scraps)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 89 (a little of everything)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2 (1 cigarette and one plastic cigar end)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

More confetti

More fishing debris

July 19, what year?

Recycling doesn't close the loop;
it restarts it

My highest weekly total ever. 478 pieces of trash washed up from one storm. And it's simply not possible that I got it all - the kelp was too thick and sandy to turn over every last bit of it, try as I might.

---

An aside:

Last week there was a dustup when a researcher in Oregon suggested that the extent of plastic pollution was exaggerated. Here's how you can really find the truth. Look down at your feet. That's all you have to do.

Maine is nowhere near a great ocean gyre. Its currents are fed from the north by waters that flow along the least populated parts of the Atlantic Ocean. And yet here is the waste of modern life washing around me. Nearly 500 pieces of plastic along 500 feet of beach, when Maine's tidal shoreline is 3,500 miles.

So fine; it's true that the plastic doesn't swirl in a vortex twice the size of Texas.

It swirls everywhere.

Deconstructing a Winter Storm

So the last several weeks have been weird at the beach. When the storms are their most violent, the flotsam is nonexistent. When the weeks are the calmest, litter runneth over. What gives?

Well, by chance, I found a big clue in another blog.

5 Gyres is a group of scientists & marine adventurers, with a twist. They raise awareness about ocean pollution by actually getting out in the oceans and documenting it. One gyre at a time, they're proving to a skeptical world that every last corner of our planet is infected by the plague of plastic waste. And that we have to do something about it.

In November they set sail from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, across the South Atlantic Gyre to Cape Town, South Africa. En route they set out scores of trawls to capture flotsam. Sadly, every single trawl brought in plastics - even in the middle of the ocean, 1500 miles from land.

from http://5gyres.org/posts/2010/12/04/
rising_from_the_deep_plastic

Sad, eye-opening, and a blog that's VERY worth reading from beginning to end. A pretty epic adventure.

But for my purposes, one part especially hit home. Early in their voyage they hit days of horrible weather - raging wind & seas. And guess what? All that energy in the ocean? It pushes things down in the water column. Their trawls still found plastic, but it was almost invisible on the water's surface.

So maybe when huge storms rise in the Gulf of Maine, all that energy does the same thing - pushes floating bits down toward the seafloor, where they have a hard time washing in to shore?

The other possibility is that they wash in to shore just fine, but are quickly buried by the same kind of brute force that can do this.

That's not supposed to happen

After all, I've pulled out plenty of three-foot-long fishing rope scraps that only had 2-3 inches exposed. And I've watched something as light as a dry old leaf stay put while Mother Nature's winds piled sand on top.

If it can happen to a leaf...

So what's happening at Bay View beach when a storm comes in? Probably, as always, a combination of both of the above -- along with a dozen other things. And as I've shown, my understanding of the whole shebang is... limited. But at least I'm in good company. The best minds in the world are only now starting to unlock the mysteries of how oceans work, and how important their health is to life as we know it.

It's great to be along for the ride.