Plastic pacific

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Wansworth

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Day time tv can cause worry.Apparently there is a vast movement of wáter in a circular movement that actually causes a gradienttowards the centre of the grye.Now this circular motion catches plastic stuff and drages it into the middle,eventually.In this process the plastic is degraded by the sunlight.So the soup of plastic made up of seawater and small bits of degraded plastic is earen by fish etc that is eatern by man causeing liver problems and cancers.I imagined this place in the Pacific as large bits of plastic drifting about but looks like its soup.
 
mogy said:
Day time tv can cause worry.Apparently there is a vast movement of wáter in a circular movement that actually causes a gradienttowards the centre of the grye.Now this circular motion catches plastic stuff and drages it into the middle,eventually.In this process the plastic is degraded by the sunlight.So the soup of plastic made up of seawater and small bits of degraded plastic is earen by fish etc that is eatern by man causeing liver problems and cancers.I imagined this place in the Pacific as large bits of plastic drifting about but looks like its soup.
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Yeah cannibals have the same problem with kids eating pennies...oh wait, no they don't because anything that's not digested is ejected, and anything in the stomach is cut out when eating (by most folks anyway).

I'm not saying the hippies are wrong about plastic in the pacific being bad, just never accept their arguments without thinking carefully or it'll be the whole "ice melting causes water levels to rise" thing all over again which was finally debunked by a clever chap with a glass of water and ice cubes :)
 
Oh and I'm still far more worried about the effects of wind and tidal power on the planet than anything else the human race is doing right now with the possible exception of all the mass we're ejecting into space for science projects. If we get light enough the sun will suck us right in...;)
 
There was not a hippy insight in the programme,just several marine biologists with simple catching nets filled with plastic soup.2hat I thought was interesting was that the sea level was lower in the middle of the circle.
 
The volumetric expansion coefficient for different fluids (including Water) is used by e.g. professionals designing large tanks. I guess the scientists did the simple math on a heck of a lot of Water?

lustyd said:
Yeah cannibals have the same problem with kids eating pennies...oh wait, no they don't because anything that's not digested is ejected, and anything in the stomach is cut out when eating (by most folks anyway).

I'm not saying the hippies are wrong about plastic in the pacific being bad, just never accept their arguments without thinking carefully or it'll be the whole "ice melting causes water levels to rise" thing all over again which was finally debunked by a clever chap with a glass of water and ice cubes :)
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macd said:
Clever indeed, to model Antarctica and Greenland into a glass.
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The "clever chap" who debunked the theory seems to have forgotten that most of the ice we should be concerned about is above sea level , when it melts a rise in sea level will happen.
How much will it rise - who knows? His analogy was rubbish.
 
stuey_two said:
The "clever chap" who debunked the theory seems to have forgotten that most of the ice we should be concerned about is above sea level , when it melts a rise in sea level will happen.
How much will it rise - who knows? His analogy was rubbish.
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I don't think it's any more rubbish than the alarmists saying we'll be swamped if we don't stop using deodorant. There is a huge amount of ice under the water too, so the sea level will be lower when the land based ice melts which will raise it back up again. With a bit of luck the status quo will be reached at just above the thames barrier and London will finally get a decent clean :D
 
Don't forget that when the waters eventually rise....

The Ark was built by an amateur................The Titanic ...was built by professionals.....

Dylan's ready....??......

duck punt ??........

Is Dylan the new Messia.......or a just a very naughty boy ?

Draw your own conclusions............
 
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lustyd said:
There is a huge amount of ice under the water too, so the sea level will be lower when the land based ice melts which will raise it back up again.
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Not very nippy with the basic physics, I fear. Archimedes sussed it some time ago: the ice under the water is exactly compensated by the above-water bit of the same ice, which is what your chap with the glass was demonstrating. Unfortunately he overlooked the fact that the doomsayers aren't worried about that ice, but about the vast icefields on land in Greenland and Antarctica all the melt from which will end up in the sea.

But then, as JomsViking notes, the biggest factor is thermal expansion. The linear coefficient of expansion of water is around six times that of iron. You don't need much of a rise in temperature to cause a body of water 3.8km thick (the average depth of the oceans) to rise quite a bit.

On the other hand water actually contracts as it warms from 0 to 4 degrees, but then not very much oceanic water is that cold.
 
lustyd said:
I'm not saying the hippies are wrong about plastic in the pacific being bad, just never accept their arguments without thinking carefully or it'll be the whole "ice melting causes water levels to rise" thing all over again which was finally debunked by a clever chap with a glass of water and ice cubes :)
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The ice which people are mostly worried about is on land, mostly in Antarctica and Greenland. If that lot melts it most certainly will cause a sea level rise.

The big problem with plastic soup is that though the plastic breaks into smaller pieces, it doesn't chemically change. Eventually it becomes plankton sized, and the things which eat plankton start ingesting plastic by mistake. Since there is only a finite amount of stuff they can process, they don't get enough nutrition and they die.
 
lustyd said:
I don't think it's any more rubbish than the alarmists saying we'll be swamped if we don't stop using deodorant. There is a huge amount of ice under the water too, so the sea level will be lower when the land based ice melts which will raise it back up again. With a bit of luck the status quo will be reached at just above the thames barrier and London will finally get a decent clean :D
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Sorry, you're wrong. I spent most of my career working on Antarctic Ice - the vast majority is ABOVE sea-level, and it is a straightforward matter to calculate that the sea-level rise that would ensur if it all melted is in the region of 60 metres (there are a few imponderables, but these are to do with response times for isostatic rebound, and change things by a few metres). Google BEDMAP for data if you feel like checking the calculations; the data are freely available, and I can vouch for their accuracy! Greenland's ice is pretty much entirely above sea-level, but the contribution from Greenland is much smaller.
 
stuey_two said:
The "clever chap" who debunked the theory seems to have forgotten that most of the ice we should be concerned about is above sea level , when it melts a rise in sea level will happen.
How much will it rise - who knows? His analogy was rubbish.
Click to expand...

I'd wondered how long it would take to illustrate the quoted fallacy.

That the globe is warming is indisputable - we're on the way out of an ice-age - whether or not Man is a significant factor, is not yet proven. Though most experts accept that the rise of man-made CO2 has corresponded curiously with temperature rises; it would be a very foolish person who carried out experiments on his life-raft when he was adrift in the Pacific 1200nm from land.
 
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