Bigdog (03-22-2018), PoliTalker (03-22-2018)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting greater. Twice the size of Texas, the floating mass is up to 16 times larger than previously thought — carrying about 79,000 metric tons of plastic — according to scientists who performed an aerial survey.
The discovery, published in the journal Scientific Reports, reveals that this plastic blight in the Pacific Ocean is still growing at what the researchers called an "exponential" pace.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP for short, is an accumulation of plastic products that has collected in the eastern Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. Much of it is hidden from the naked eye, partly because some of the plastic has been broken down into smaller and smaller bits over time. (It is not, as its name may suggest, an island.) The concentration of floating plastic in the patch ranges from tens to hundreds of kilograms per square kilometer.
"It's quite frightening … we're so far from any human activity, there's nothing out there, and we still leave traces as a society," said lead author Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation based in the Netherlands. Out in the stretch of these blue seas, the plastic is a jarring reminder of human impact.
continued with graphics.
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...322-story.html
Bigdog (03-22-2018), PoliTalker (03-22-2018)
Massive Oil Fields in Texas Are Heaving, Sinking, And Opening Up Like Mouths
4,000 square miles of geohazard.
PETER DOCKRILL 22 MAR 2018
It began with sinkholes. Two of them, gaping mouths to nowhere opening up as if to swallow the town of Wink, Texas. As they expanded, there were fears they might collide, morphing into one giant void.
They first emerged in 1980, and things haven't gotten better since. Now, an unprecedented study reveals Wink and its vast sinkholes are just a tiny part of a much bigger problem – a vast stretch of historical oil fields that are heaving and sinking, covering an area almost the size of Connecticut.
"The ground movement we're seeing is not normal," explains geophysicist Zhong Lu from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"The ground doesn't typically do this without some cause."
Lu was part of a team who in 2016 used satellite data to reveal that the two Wink sinkholes weren't frozen in place, but could be about to expand in response to subsidence detected in and around the town.
Now, the researchers have used the same techniques, zoomed out, to find that an area encompassing some 10,360 square kilometres (4,000 square miles) – covering four counties and six towns – is in fact sinking and uplifting, in parts by as much as 1 metre (40 inches).
"These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water," Lu says.
"Proactive, continuous detailed monitoring from space is critical to secure the safety of people and property."
The satellite data the team used was sourced overhead in between November 2014 and April 2017, and coupled with oil-well production data provided by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the researchers conclude this epic instability is the result of decades of oil extraction in the area, and its knock-on effects on rocks below the surface of the earth.
continued with photos
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive...oles-geohazard
Some entrepreneur should collect all that shit and recycle it for fuel.
It is a big mass that take its shape from the ocean currents. In that manner it "swirls" but in way you cannot see with the naked eye. Some parts of it are quite obvious by large masses of plastic on the surface bunched together (the biggest I have seen is about .75 NM across). I would say about 95% of it is plastics that have been degraded and broke up. They float in the water column 100's of feet. They will clog strainers for raw water cooling systems on ships and obviously any marine life that ingests these plastics are pretty much assured a shortened life span.
There was a teenager who started thinking about this in 2012. Boyan Slat is his name. He came up with a economical, brilliant way of doing that. Companies like myself have invested in his idea and it is coming to fruition.
Here is a link, worth a read: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-22...s&limitstart=1
That's wonderful... Leave it to the young..
Excerpt:
15 MAY 2017
Dutch innovator Boyan Slat's audacious plan to clear plastic from the marine area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is undergoing some major design changes. But the 22-year-old tells Business Insider that the first cleanup array is set to launch sooner than expected.
"Instead of late 2020, the cleanup will now start in just 12 months from now, and parts of it are already in production," Slat says.
Slat's nonprofit, the Ocean Cleanup, plans to try to install systems to remove vast quantities of plastic from the Pacific ocean. The systems are designed to float on the surface of an area that collects pollution from around the world, and skim plastic off the top layer of water.
Slat's original design involved mooring a massive plastic-collecting trap to the seabed 4.5 kilometres below (2.8 miles) - a controversial plan that gave rise to concerns among scientists.
Sailor (03-22-2018)
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