Trashing The Wide Blue Sea

The world's oceans are vast and mysterious.  Depending on the hemisphere in which they are located; north, south, east, west, and the environmental zones, they are the connective tissues to the great land masses that we call the continents.  They don't lead to sailing merrily off to places where monsters lurk, nor to the edge of the world where the unwary captain of his ship risks falling off the edge into nothingness.

Some areas of the world's oceans are held to be haunted by peculiar whirling, sucking waters that when in motion comprise a threat to the shipping community and they are known as ships' graveyards, best to be avoided.  The Atlantic is capable of presenting catastrophic weather conditions leading to destructive storms inimical to ships' survival.

The Atlantic presents as watery grey and stormy black, while the Pacific greets us as a more pacific blue far less threatening though storms regularly occur there as well.  One may drown there without freezing in the process.  Which would certainly occur in the Arctic and the Antarctic with their immense ice shelves and glaciers and immense floating icebergs presenting their own threats.


Send a message in a bottle across the seas and eventually someone may retrieve it and contact you, although cellphones and Internet are much more reliable and certainly more expedient.  If you're in the vastness of the ocean, somewhere outside shipping lanes and channels the waters would be pristine, we assume. 

Deep down below there are aquatic creatures infinitesimally minuscule, and gigantic in proportions. Deep down below in the vast interior reaches of the ocean, there is the ocean floor, and it is comprised of the rocky mantle of the Earth with vast mineral resources which the countries of the world ever seeking new sources of revenue and energy and materials, are anxious to exploit.


But above, on the surface of the ocean, there is a growing presence of waste.  We have befouled the Earth upon which we live, space that stretches enormously above us, and of course, the oceans of the world as well.  This is our neat little nest in a vast universe of heavenly objects stippling space, and we have made a garbage patch of what we dwell upon.


Scientists have made note of a 'killer soup of microplastic - particles smaller than 5 millimetres (1/5th") that is altering the ocean's natural presence.  Between 1972 to 1987, there was no microplastic in samples taken for testing, according to the Royal Society journal Biology Letters in a paper just published.


Now the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) (or the Great Pacific Garbage patch), is estimated to be the size of Texas.  "The abundance of small human-produced plastic particles in the NPSG has increased by 100 times over the last four decades", reads a statement on the findings of researchers from the University of California.


Around 13,000 pieces of plastic litter appear in every square kilometre of sea, according to the United Nations Environment Program.  The North Pacific, however, is where the problem is most acute.  Plastic particles, full of toxic chemicals,  are taken up by marine life and birds.


The NPSG, according to the newly-published study, provides a new habitat for ocean insects named "sea-skaters", preying on plankton and fish eggs.  They in turn are fed on by seabirds, turtles and fish.  This is an unhealthy world we are producing.