Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)
SLS - Kara Lavender Law (Sea Education Association, Woods Hole) "Plastic in the Ocean: Trash, Tracer, and Environmental Threat"
Date |
Time |
Location |
January 21st, 2015 |
12:10pm-1:00pm |
54-915 |
Plastic pollution in the ocean is an environmental problem that has captured the attention of marine conservationists, anti-plastic activists, the media and the general public. Although ocean plastics were first reported in the 1970s, scientific attention to this problem has increased only recently and misconceptions about the problem are common. Basic questions about the amount, distribution, fate, and effects of plastic in the marine environment have not yet been answered, despite concerns about potential threats to the marine ecosystem and human health. At Sea Education Association (SEA; www.sea.edu), students and scientists began collecting data on floating plastic debris in the 1980s. Small plastic fragments, termed "microplastics", act as passive tracers of surface circulation, accumulating in convergence zones at multiple scales . The lifetime and ultimate fate of microplastics is unknown because of a dearth of information about physical breakdown and chemical degradation in the ocean, yet the environmental risk is hypothesized to increase with decreasing particle size. The state of the scientific research into plastic marine debris will be presented, with a focus on the mass balance, distribution, and breakdown of plastics in the ocean.