Hello Explorers
As my module comes to an end, I wanted to end off on a more positive note with a Story of Hope for our oceans. This entry will feature one of the biggest ventures of our generation (in my personal opinion) – cleaning up that gargantuam Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the rest of the ocean!
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a patch of floating debris floating around the North Pacific Ocean. However, contrary to popular belief, this patch is not a patch of visible, large debris but rather plenty of small debris pieces mainly plastic (NOAA, 2020). The marine debris get constantly mixed in this ‘soup’ by wind and wave/current action which makes them hard to clean up entirely (NOAA, 2020). Boyan Slat, the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup sought to fix this but first conducting research.
The Ocean Cleanup harnessed the energy of the ocean – the currents and the physics principle of drag, in designing their cleanup method. As I do not want to miscommunicate any key information, here is a video from their YouTube channel on how the device works:
They are also currently in works to cleanup some of the most polluted rivers in the world too, with a new approach depending on the region.
While these are big, ambitious steps into providing communites a new start, hopefully if the fish return to the rivers, more needs to be done on a legislative level – to protect not only the livelihoods of the local people but the ecosystem. If things don’t change, the rivers will go back to being polluted within a few years. How do we get these multidisciplinary solutions to tie together in a way that makes sense for a more secured and permanent future?
I personally find their work very inspiring because all it took was one University student to say “hey, here’s a problem, I wonder if it can be fixed?” and he got down into doing the math for it. And the size of his company, his team shows that there are people who care about the state of our ocean and who are willing to invest the money to find a solution. Whether the operation is a full success or a partial success, we will still be multitudes closer to saving the oceans than we would have if no one had taken a step.
So I say my fellow ocean lovers, Explorers, and stewards of this planet (that’s all of us by the way), stay hopeful and continue to work.
References
NOAA. What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? National Ocean Service website, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/garbagepatch.html, 04/09/2020
The Ocean Cleanup. Cleaning up the Garbage Patches. The Ocean Cleanup website, https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/, accessed 21/07/2020
Videos retrieved from: The Ocean Cleanup YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/TheOceanCleanup/videos , 21/07/2020.