Dive Into Your Imagination

August 12, 2009
Annie Crawley's Journal

I had not slept much and at 4:13 in the morning I found myself wide awake.  I tried to go back to sleep, but it was almost as if I had an angel telling me to get up and take a walk around the deck.  So I slipped on my shoes and did not even change out of my pajamas.  I left my cabin and walked down to the wet lab where Meg and Darcy were processing the last CTD samples.  It was then I realized why I was drawn out of bed.  In Meg’s flow-through system there was a foreign object pulled up from a couple hundred meters below the surface and it looked as if it was a piece of plastic.  She will not know for certain until her research is funded and she can run samples, but I was able to photograph it before she put it into the freezer.  I never want to sleep because everything interesting seems to happen on the night shift.

August 9th 2009
Annie Crawley's Journal

At 2:40 in the afternoon on August 8th with the launch of a CTD, the first of three 24 hour intensives began in the North Pacific Gyre. By August 9th at the same time more than 24 scientific events had been logged. The Oozeki Net, Bongos and CTD had been deployed four times each and the manta triple that. Between deploying, retrieving, processing, data entry and then trying to comprehend what was actually happening was a bit mind boggling. Many people were up for more than 24 hours yet safety was still the number one priority. Miriam took some time and gave me an interview. At this point plastic had been coming up in every manta trawl for more than 2.5 days.

When we woke up on August 8th, we had traveled more than one thousand miles.  The tension was rising on the New Horizon because the mantas continued to have small bits of plastic in them, but the scientists really wanted to reach the highest area of accumulated plastic within the North Pacific Gyre.  So it became a waiting game.  As the waiting game ensued, the mantas, dip netting, and visual observations continued, and the acoustic array continued to be deployed.  By the 7th day, I not only fully understood what constituted the North Pacific Gyre, but I also learned a lot more about plastic.  I knew that many plastics are made from oil and that they contained chemicals that were bad for us.  Thanks to Chelsea I started to understand the extent of all the harmful effects these can have on life: both the actual constitution of water, the organisms and how it can work its way up the food chain to us.

What is Plastic?
Many plastics are petroleum based products made of polymers. The raw materials for plastic are made from coal, oil, and natural gases; in other words, plastic is made from limited resources.  Plastic cannot biodegrade.  It can only photodegrade, meaning light breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces termed confetti by Dr. Charles Moore.  It never goes away completely.  This is because plastic was a miracle invention only adopted widely once it was absolutely indestructible. Plastic was originally invented in 1862 and eventually replaced products made from natural materials.  With the average human being creating one ton of trash per year, millions of pounds of trash are entering our Ocean, and much of this is plastic.

August 7, 2009

For the past six days I have been surrounded by miles and miles of endless blue ocean. We have been traveling 10 knots a day and approaching the targeted area of our expedition. I feel a freedom out in the ocean that does not exist when I am on land.  I stare out at the surface of the ocean we are merely skimming and in my mind I can visualize the volcanic mountains, schools of fish and creatures living below, and yet we see nothing from above except the sea meeting the sky.  We are traveling the last 200 miles toward the area these scientists believe has the highest accumulation of plastic.  To fully understand where we are heading and why we may find plastic here, it is important to understand the physical qualities of this part of the ocean.

What is a gyre?
A gyre is made of oceanic currents.  There are 5 major oceanic gyres in the world.  It is a rotating water mass, like a slow spinning vortex, created due to surface winds pushing on water, pressure gradient forces, and The Coriolis Effect.