Marine Snow
Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2022 12:44 pmThe cover story in the NYC Science section today is very interesting. Titled Deep-Sea Disruption (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/scie ... =url-share), it's about "marine snow" which is all the little bits of who-knows-what that we see drifting by in underwater photography. Some of the info in the article is in direct contradiction to what we usually hear. So, for example:
"Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter the Earth's Oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but water surveys have accounted for only about 1 percent of the ocean's estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean."
and
"Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. "
and
"A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world's oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the sea floor each year.
Three comments: (1) no mention of carbon sequestration. (2) I'm not an editor, I'm not an English major, but boy it was hard to type this stuff as written. Just about every sentence needs correction. (3) This is probably behind a pay wall. I'll try to save a copy that I can send or link to for anyone having trouble reading it.
"Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter the Earth's Oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but water surveys have accounted for only about 1 percent of the ocean's estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean."
and
"Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. "
and
"A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world's oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the sea floor each year.
Three comments: (1) no mention of carbon sequestration. (2) I'm not an editor, I'm not an English major, but boy it was hard to type this stuff as written. Just about every sentence needs correction. (3) This is probably behind a pay wall. I'll try to save a copy that I can send or link to for anyone having trouble reading it.