June Read/Lydia

Title: Tracking Trash

Author: Loree Griffin Burns

ISBN: 13:978-0-618-58131-3

Pages: 56

Lydia's Read: 

The book is made up of five chapters. In chapter 1: A Spill of Opportunity, it introduces an interesting investigation of an oceanographer. Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographic consultant, who studied ocean movements and helped determine where to place a cleaned sewage outflow pipe in the sea. But in 1990, Curtis’s career took an interesting turn. His mother read an article in a local newspaper that described a landfall of hundreds of sneakers on beaches. She believed that her son could find out the origin of the sneakers. Curtis didn’t want to disappoint his mother and began his investigation at the beach. He collected a lot of information about the sneakers with beachcombers, who spend their time searching for interesting things at the ocean shore. Finally he could identify, that the sneakers were spilled from the ship “Hansa Carrier” and the spilled location. Although it started from his mother’s curiosity, the “sneaker chase” had become much, much more. He believed that sneaker spill represented the greatest oceanographic drift experiment.

Loree Griffin Burns

In chapter 2: The Science of Ocean Motion, it teaches us the ocean movements. Ocean movements are driven by complicated forces that include wind systems, the rotation of the planet, and variation in water temperature, density, and saltiness. The sum of these forces is strong currents that move in fairly predictable patterns. For a long time, oceanographers have used drifting objects to study the movement of the ocean. Over time they improved their drift equipment from sealed glass bottles, in which included a survey letter, to satellite-tracked drift objects. Curtis thought the “Hansa Carrier” spill represents the largest ocean drift experiment and would be useful to study ocean movement. He contacted his fellow oceanographer W. James Ingraham. James had spent years perfecting a computer program that could calculate surface current movement in the North Pacific Ocean. The program called the Ocean Surface CURrent Simulator (nicknamed OSCURS). OSCURS predicted that the drift of the sneakers would have been very different from year to year.

In chapter 3: Another Day, Another Spill, it shows several cases of spills in the ocean. While Curtis and James tracked the sneakers, they heard about other various cargo spills that they could use to learn about ocean currents. Meanwhile they asked new spill data to OSCURS, they have contacted with the beachcombing community. They found the Beachcombers’ and Oceanographers’ International Association (BOIA) to help and prepare for future spills in the ocean.

In chapter 4: The Garbage Patch, it talks about the plastic pollution in the ocean. The Garbage Patch lies in a convergence zone, an area of the ocean where numerous currents come together and force surface waters to sink. Captain Charlie Moore, who is the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), and his colleagues discovered the Eastern Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean. Its location coincided exactly with the place James’s hypothetical drifters collected in the OSCURS long-term drift experiment. Charlie’s research team collected samples in the Garbage Patch and got the result; they found six pounds of plastics for every pound of zooplankton. That point of this study was that there isn’t any place free from plastic pollution in the oceans. AMRF plan to continue tracking trash in the Eastern Garbage Patch and other places in the world ocean.

In chapter 5, Monster Debris means all kind of trash in the ocean. It includes ghost nets, that are lost, ripped, or thrown from fishing vessel, can tangle marine creatures, even trash in their path. Drifting ghost nets also crush and scrape coral reefs, ruining hundreds of year worth of coral growth in the crash of a single wave. These ghost nets are highly destructive. How do you find ghost nets in an ocean that is larger than all seven continents combined? The job would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack…, unless you know something about Pacific Ocean currents and how floating objects drift in them. Combining information from satellites with information from computer models like OSCURS will help scientists to locate the Garbage Patch -and therefore ghost nets- more accurately.

This book has awoken the reader to the troubling quantity of trash adrift on the ocean, especially plastic. What can you do to help save the ocean from plastic? There is no organism anywhere on the planet that can digest plastic. Captain Charlie Moore emphasized the three R’s in the book; Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.