Plastiki update

If you're not following the unusual Plastiki expidition, its a boat made of thousands of plastic drink bottles, sailing across the Pacific to raise awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans.  They've now travelled 1900 nautical miles and are about 1000 miles east of Hawaii.  Follow them here or on Twitter as @Plastiki

More on the geo-hacking idea

Not so long ago I posted about the idea of capturing all the extra atmospheric CO2 into the worlds oceans by fertilising them and thereby creating enormous plantkon blooms that would convert all the CO2 to plant tissues, which would then sink to the bottom and be buried in the ocean depths.  This new scientist article probes a different angle that I didn't think of, which is Who decides what we will or won't do to change these things?  The author Jim Giles refers not just to ocean fertilising, but engineering the whole planet to combat climate change - what has become popularly known as "geo-hacking" - including sensible concepts like reforestation and cloud seeding, as well as the more absurd notions such as building giant reflectors to bounce the sunlight away.  Its a thought provoking question, so who do you think should decide these issues?  The US? UN? UNESCO?  Perhaps we need a new body with that as its sole charter?

The ghost of fishers past

The folks you see out on their boats on the bay are not the only ones fishing; those who came before them still get a slice of the action, as this recent article about the retrieval of "ghost gear" from the Chesapeake Bay illustrates.  In many trap-based fishing industries, like lobsters and crabs, a significant number of traps are lost during the course of regular fishing efforts.  In addition, when a fishery turns bad, as happened in the Long Island Sound lobster fishery in 1999, some fishers cut their losses, and their marker floats, quit the fishery and just leave their gear where it is on the bottom of the bay.

The problem is, ghost gear like this keeps on fishing, long after the fisher has moved on to other endeavours.  The design of the trap continues to attract animals, even without bait, because the trap is basically a refuge or cave.  Those that enter are unable to leave and as they die they may act as bait to attract yet more animals to feed on their body.  In this way, the trap becomes a sort of "biomass black hole", sucking in animals from all around, for as long as the trap holds together.  Nets can ghost fish too, especially gillnets or any kind of trawl that can trap fish or strangle a reef

We used to trawl up ghost lobster gear all the time when I was working in Long Island Sound.  Indeed, few days on the water went by without snagging someone's old gear at some point, which speaks to the density of gear that's out there in some inshore waters.  I'm glad the fishers and the resource management agencies are working together to address the problem, because its one of those awful chronic out-of-sight, out-of-mind issues that can erode a fishery despite everyone's best efforts to manage things properly.  If you find ghost gear, call your local DEP or DEC, even the EPA, and let them know so they can come and retrieve it.

Picture of ghost gear on a coral reef from NOAA

Bon Voyage, Plastiki

Some enterprising folks have built a tri-maran out of 12,000 two liter plastic softdrink bottles.  Dubbed the "Plastiki", she took to sea today, on her maiden voyage from San Francisco to Sydney.  Along the way, the Plastiki will serve as a floating demonstration platform for sustainable technologies, and will spend some quality time in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where vast amounts of floating plastic debris are becalmed in the heart of the enormous gyre current of the North Pacific.

Follow the Plastiki on Flickr here, and on their website here.  Best of luck and kind winds, folks.  If you begin to lose buoyancy, I guess you can always reach overboard and grab another bottle from among the flotsam, you know, to repair the hull with.  :-/