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Wind pushes plastics deeper into oceans, driving trash estimates up (with video)
http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/wind-pushes-plastics-deeper-into-oceans-driving-trash-estimates-up-with-video[font face=Times,Times New Roman,Serif]April 25, 2012
[font size=5]Wind pushes plastics deeper into oceans, driving trash estimates up (with video)[/font]
By Nancy Gohring
[font size=3]While working on a research sailboat gliding over glassy seas in the Pacific Ocean, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski noticed something new: The water was littered with confetti-size pieces of plastic debris, until the moment the wind picked up and most of the particles disappeared.
After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. That meant that decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said.
Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters this month, Proskurowski and co-lead author Tobias Kukulka, University of Delaware, said that data collected from just the surface of the water commonly underestimates the total amount of plastic in the water by an average factor of 2.5.
In high winds the volume of plastic could be underestimated by a factor of 27.
…
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2012GL051116
[font size=5]Wind pushes plastics deeper into oceans, driving trash estimates up (with video)[/font]
By Nancy Gohring
[font size=3]While working on a research sailboat gliding over glassy seas in the Pacific Ocean, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski noticed something new: The water was littered with confetti-size pieces of plastic debris, until the moment the wind picked up and most of the particles disappeared.
After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. That meant that decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said.
Reporting in Geophysical Research Letters this month, Proskurowski and co-lead author Tobias Kukulka, University of Delaware, said that data collected from just the surface of the water commonly underestimates the total amount of plastic in the water by an average factor of 2.5.
In high winds the volume of plastic could be underestimated by a factor of 27.
…
…[/font][/font]