Ocean Plastic Pollution Essay

Ocean Plastic Pollution

I chose to discuss Ocean Plastic Pollution. I retrieved an article from the LiveScience.com which is a website that covers scientific news. The author of the article I chose, “Plastic Trash in Oceans May Be ‘Vastly’ Underestimated”, is Jeanna Bryner who is the LiveScience Managing Editor. She is part of the LiveScience organization. This article was published April 27th, 2012. The mission of the report is to inform the general public that plastic debris in the ocean is increasing and is an overlooked problem that is underestimated in oceanic pollution damage. Jeanna prepared for the report by looking at reports from the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters, studies and by interviewing the oceanographer who noticed the increase in plastic debris in

Proskurowski and his colleague Tobiras Kukulka of the University of Delaware wrote a theory that suggested that on average, the plastic debris in the ocean is 2.5 times higher than what surface water sampling estimates states. The Journal of Geophysical Research Letters report that in high winds, the volume of plastic trash could be underestimated by a factor of 27. This plastic pollution can damage the ecosystem and other organisms contains in it. The plastic bits can degrade a fish’s liver as well as become suitable hosts for bacteria and algae to travel on to different areas of the ocean where they could become invasive and cause more harm to the oceanic environment. In Proskurowski’s interview with Livescience, he discussed his study from 2010 stating that they found 2.5 times more debris in the layers of water that are below the surface. The debris was scattered from 65 to 82 feet. He claims that wind may be driving large amounts of trash deeper into the ocean. He backed up this claim using his study about the depth range of scattered debris below the ocean’s surface