Seattlelite, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer known for his study of currents related to the accidental release of Nike sneakers and rubber ducks, has always been attracted to the ocean.
Though tracking rubber duckies sounds whimsical, Ebbesmeyer shares that there is a crisis taking place in our oceans that is mostly hidden from view. The story is both heart-rending and potentially life-threatening.
Ebbesmeyer found his way to this story on an unlikely path.
He grew up in the Los Angeles on a farm, but his desire to connect to the ocean manifested early. He was a scuba diver and enjoyed watching Lloyd Bridges ‘Sea Hunt’ and Jacques Cousteau specials on television.
Then he got to one of those forks in the road. “I could either go to Viet Nam or enroll in oceanography school. That wasn’t a hard decision,” he says.
Ebbesmeyer received his oceanography Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1973 and became Mobile Oil’s first oceanographer. They set him the engineering task of building in dangerous environments, in this case ‘Iceberg Alley’ off the Grand Banks south of Newfoundland where the Titanic sank.
In those days, it was believed that the 100-year wave was about 55 feet in height, so that was what oil rigs were designed to withstand.
Ebbesmeyer says, “We decided to actually measure the waves with scientific equipment and in 1969 we measured a 72-foot wave which became the new 100-year standard.”
“Now with global warming, hurricanes are routinely producing 100-foot waves. In fact, off the coast of Washington and Oregon, we’ve measured three waves measuring over 100 feet in the last three years.”
“A hurricane or a typhoon sounds like a big deal because of the name. In fact, we have bigger storms on the West Coast, we just don’t seem to have a fancy name for them,” he contends.
“‘Gale’ isn’t correct. A gale starts at 34 m.p.h. The best name I’ve seen is ‘meteorological bombs.’ Storms intensify when they hit our coast and end up as strong as the biggest of them.”
The Nike Sneaker ‘Spill’
Ebbesmeyer’s transformation from an engineer working for ‘Big Oil’ to passionate freelance oceanographer started sometime around 1990 when the Nike shoes went overboard.
According to Keith C. Heidorn, in The Weather Doctor, “In late May of 1990, the container vessel Hansa Carrier encountered a severe storm in the north Pacific Ocean on its passage from Korea to the United States. During the storm, a large wave washed twenty-one shipping containers overboard. Five of these 20-metre containers held a shipment of approximately 80,000 Nike shoes. . . four of the containers opened, releasing over 60,000 shoes into the north Pacific Ocean.”
When Ebbesmeyers’ mother heard about the shoes, she called him and said something like, “What are you doing about these shoes? Isn’t this what you study?”
He cites his mother’s call as the beginning of his life’s work.
About his chosen field, he says, “I feel oceanography has gone off into ever smaller and smaller issues. It has a blind spot. I wanted to pursue what’s really floating on the ocean, which is largely unknown. I want to know what the albatrosses feed on. So I started by creating a network of beachcombers who could tell me what they were finding and where.”
Grassroots Garbage Gang and Trash
The honorable hobby of beach combing has a long history. Traditionally ‘jetsam’ was something thrown off a boat to lighten its load and these items were fair game when they landed on the beach wrack line—the swath of debris deposited by the previous high tide.
Flotsam was defined as what had floated off a wrecked ship, and it still belonged to the owner of the ship no matter where it made shore. (These definitions, used in courts to establish ownership in the early days of marine law, have been blurred.)
Our Grassroots Garbage Gang, which Ebbesmeyer whole-heartedly applauds, has just combed the beach picking up tons of plastics, fireworks remnants, rope, beer bottles, sofas and other larger objects. These objects are unsightly and dangerous to beach goers and marine animals alike. But they are only the trash visible to the eye of the landlubbers.
What Ebbesmeyer and his global network of beach combers and sailors have discovered is that there is tons of man-made, non-biodegradable, petroleum-based plastic trash floating in our oceans.
“There are government agencies who say they focus on the ocean but on a scale of one to ten, this issue is about a one. In my life, floating plastic gets at least an eight.”
Plastic Is a Non-biodegradable Killer
For hundreds of years, mankind has felt that the seas were infinite and could be used as a dumping grounds for toxic waste of all kinds. Officially there is a no-dumping policy for the oceans, but as Ebbesmeyer indicates this is meaningless as there is no monitoring of what is actually happening on the open seas.
For instance, Ebbesmeyer estimates that between 2,000-10,000 containers fall overboard every year. A container can carry anything from 15,000 Nike sneakers to 10 million plastic grocery bags. And this data only captures accidents; many more infractions happen deliberately. 80% of beach garbage comes from land-based sources, and 20% from ships at sea.
Plastic is particularly deadly in the sea because man-made plastic objects get caught around the necks of turtles, seabirds and fish. Additionally, to a sea turtle, a floating plastic grocery bag looks like a jelly fish.
Adult albatrosses, as it turns out, not only eat plastic, they feed plastic to their chicks who die of starvation.
Floating plastic looks like food.
The key ingredients in plastics are petroleum and natural gas—the manufacturing of plastic bags alone accounts for 4 per cent of the world’s total oil production. According to data released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, between 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year.
Floating debris can also absorb organic pollutants from seawater, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and DDT.
The Grassroots Garbage Gang is providing a critical community service by picking up beach trash because garbage at the wrack line is simply washed back out to sea where worse horrors are happening.
If trash is biodegradable—even though it is unsightly—at least it is broken down over time and simply dissolves or bio-degrades back into its natural component substances.
Not so for plastic.
As plastic does not biodegrade, it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller particles until it becomes invisible to the naked eye.
Ocean Currents and Garbage Gyres
So there is both visible and invisible garbage in the ocean; and how it moves is something that Ebbesmeyer has studied intensively.
The ocean has definable currents that take predictable paths, as was proven by Ebbesymer and others in analyzing where the Nike shoes and escaped rubber duckies turned up.
As well, there are circular currents called gyres that push objects into spirals with relatively unmoving centers. This spiral effect, most apparent in air and water, causes tornados, the swirl of water down a drain, dust devils, and the like.
As any kayaker who has been caught in a whirlpool knows, once inside a gyre it is very difficult to get out. This is essentially what happens to ocean garbage.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, located between the equator and 50º N latitude, there are ten million square miles that make up the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, also known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Caused by four prevailing ocean currents, the North Pacific Gyre has a clockwise circular pattern and in the center is what has come to be called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex.
Eventually, all floating trash—which is primarily plastic—ends up circling on the ocean currents and comes to rest in one of five global oceanic ‘garbage gyres.’
Microscopic Plastic Particles Outnumber Plankton
The hidden killer in the ocean suspended near the surface of the water in these garbage gyres are tiny particles of plastic.
One website indicates, “Unlike debris which biodegrades, the photodegraded plastic disintegrates into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. This process continues down to the molecular level.”
These plastic particles float on top of the surface of the water in a zone called the neustonic layer, this is the topmost layer of water that receives the most light and is typically rich with plankton and surface feeding marine life. (Neuston is the collective term for organisms that float on or live just under the water’s surface.)
Our Pacific Garbage Patch has one of the highest levels of plastic particulate matter suspended in this upper water column.
As Ebbesmeyer indicates, “Big pieces of trash in the ocean could be a television or a refrigerator but the tiny stuff is really tiny. Imagine, shaking a salt shaker over the ocean, only the salt is tiny pieces of plastic.”
He continues, “In some areas, if you filter the ocean water through cheese cloth, the volume of plastic particles far outweighs plankton. There are trillions upon trillions of small particles. There are in some places twenty times the amount of plankton.”
In a 2001 study, ocean researchers found that the overall concentration of plastics in the ocean was greater than the concentration of zooplankton by a factor of seven.
This is the result of decades of plastic waste accumulating in the ocean, and it is only beginning to be studied and measured.
Frighteningly, this plastic waste is eaten by feeders in the neuston which are in turn eaten by larger organisms. Thus, these plastic particles enter and begin moving up the food chain.
It is extremely likely that when we eat ocean fish, we are consuming probably pollutant-contaminated microscopic plastic particles. As Ebbesymeyer says, “imagine pouring a salt shaker of plastic pieces over your piece of salmon.”
But even as oceanographers are beginning to understand the danger, there is no clear remedy in sight.
“It’s like putting smoke back into a bottle,” says Ebbesmeyer. “How do you do it?”
Balancing Despair with Optimism
Being a witness to the decimation of our oceans to trash and other ecological disasters is a heart-breaking endeavor.
Ebbesmeyer shares, “Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles are an endangered species. [They made the list in December of 1970.] In Texas where the females come ashore to nest and hatch their eggs, you should see the trash. It just tears your heart up watching the turtles coming onto the beach in all that trash.”
“And you know I just picked ten pounds of cherries in my back yard. But the starlings are gone, the bees are gone. I like to be a happy guy,” says Ebbesmeyer, “but it’s a challenge to be happy while you’re going over a waterfall.”
Most beachcombers are aware of the garbage problem and Ebbesmeyer attends most of the national beachcombers fairs to spread the word and talk to others about remedies.
Beachcombing fairs take place in the prime beachcombing coasts of the nation—our own beaches in Oregon and Washington and those of eastern Florida.
“The Ocean Shores fair is the first weekend in March, and Grayland has one the third weekend in March,” Ebbesmeyer says. “March and April have the most flotsam on the West Coast because of the winds blowing out of the west so it’s a natural time for the gatherings.”
“Grayland’s fair has been going for 45 years. You find people collecting and selling beach glass and glass balls. I usually go there with an empty table and people put their trash on my table and we talk. Ten to twenty percent of our beach trash comes from Japan. In Hawaii is more like thirty to fifty percent.”
He goes on, “I remember one young boy coming by my table and saying, ‘Well, you’re never going to sell any of that stuff.’”
He laughs. “But I’ve never been in this for the money. I’m in it for the understanding.”
When asked what the solutions are to saving our oceans, Ebbesmeyer has plenty of suggestions. “We can stop putting chemicals on our lawns and all those golf courses. Stop using plastic bags at the grocery stores.”
“If we all make little steps we’ll be fine. We all have to do it though. It isn’t going to come from big government,” he says.
“We can do better. We’ve got to educate ourselves and others. People are smart—most everybody is pretty dog-gone savvy.”
“We can make biodegradable plastics out of corn instead of petroleum polymers. Corn-made plastic dissolves. We might be going up against the DuPont’s of the world but we can do it.”
“We aren’t a nation of whimps. We founded this country with some pretty tough people. We can rescue this country. I met a young cashier and she said to me, ‘I’m going to take back the planet one person at a time.’ She is trying to get people to use cloth or paper bags instead of plastic.”
He continues, “When you go to the beach, take a bag and fill it full of plastic and take it home. The solution has to come from all of us, one at a time. It’s got to be each of us doing something every day.”
“Let’s start making billions and billions of wise choices.”
