Thinking only of todays catch, Not tomorrows Kill

by Gerry Rasmus
(Jomtien, Thailand)

Old line and fishing nets thrown overboard

Old line and fishing nets thrown overboard

Aloha:


This was drifting when we pulled it to shore. Things like this cause accidents with Jet Skis, Small boats, brake props, stops ships, takes divers to remove and repair, rips, kills coral and other animal and plant life on the sea floor.

It took 6 of us to drag it to the road's edge to be removed. A tangled mess of floating waste, dragging the bottom, oil-soaked line, fishing net, people that do things like this, should have their fishing license removed, some jail time and a heavy fine.

Barry's Response - Well thank goodness you people were there to take care of this little part of our planet. And thank you for doing so and informing the rest of us of the situation.

Garbage deposited into the water by mankind has been collecting there. Some floating, some sinking to the bottom. Ocean currents carry it slowly and, combined with wind patterns, draw the garbage out to sea in a vortex-shaped pattern.

Most of these pieces
float near the surface, but just under so they are not easy to see. The pieces tend to be quite small, so they're even harder to detect individually. Sampling techniques employ fishing nets to determine how much is captured.

Some of the areal concentrations found in samples have been several hundred thousand pieces, weighing a total of 5 kg or more per square kilometre. With an estimated area for the patch in the Pacific Ocean about the size of North America itself, that adds up to a lot o'junk.

Search this site for more information now.

Click here to post comments

Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. How? Simply click here to return to Water Pollution.



Do you have concerns about air pollution in your area??

Perhaps modelling air pollution will provide the answers to your question.

That is what I do on a full-time basis.  Find out if it is necessary for your project.



Have your Say...

on the StuffintheAir         facebook page


Other topics listed in these guides:

The Stuff-in-the-Air Site Map

And, 

See the newsletter chronicle. 


Thank you to my research and writing assistants, ChatGPT and WordTune, as well as Wombo and others for the images.

GPT-4, OpenAI's large-scale language generation model (and others provided by Google and Meta), helped generate this text.  As soon as draft language is generated, the author reviews, edits, and revises it to their own liking and is responsible for the content.