Science Results : Daily Update

Daily Update | Current SEA Research

July 4, 2010

By Giora Proskurowski

Today I turn over the science update to Dave "Murph" Murphy. Murph sailed as a student in 2007, returned as a "lab hand" in 2008, and after an underway promotion has been sailing as a scientist since. Murph runs an organized lab, with humor and insight. This is my third SEA trip with Murph, meaning that we've spent 4 of the past 18 months in close proximity, working and joking around on SEA boats. Each SEA trip with Murph has been both fantastic, and better than the last.

By David Murphy

As you may imagine, science is going full tilt around here. Every watch is fully occupied with processing neuston tows, CTD's, Tucker trawls, RBR's (another type of CTD), and the ever more common microbiological data collection. The volunteers are probably counting more tiny bits of plastic than they had envisioned when coming up with their life master plan: to date, a total of 44,113 pieces to be exact. To be quite honest, it is a little underwhelming to see 250 tiny pieces of plastic piled up, amounting to not much more than a small marble's worth. What a wonderful juxtaposition of counting the infinitesimal pollutants of an immense abyss.

I am sure you have been fully versed along the track by other posts regarding some of the detail involved with what were doing. I find it increasingly interesting to ponder this predicament from a more distant perspective. Let's try and imagine the life journey of some of these pieces that we now find residing in the most isolated of places. For plastic to be here in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, a lot of energy must have been expended. From raw material, manufacturing (many thousands of miles away, sometimes even across the globe), exposed to consumer influences, use, and global trade, and then placed at the mercy of geophysical global redistribution; plastic finds itself here with remarkable accuracy.

It is now here in a very isolated environment; however, I don't think that it is in equilibrium. The plastic we are finding (and in particular, the elements that compose this material), hypothetically, has a long ways to go. Whether it bio-accumulates, or biodegrades and transforms into a steady natural state similar to its elemental beginning via microbial avenues or physical decomposition, is to be determined, and is a stimulus for this research as a whole.

I recall learning that in any irreversible system, entropy never decreases. Think of the classic textbook case, where it is more difficult and thus less likely to keep and maintain a clean bedroom than it is to let it get messy (however distressing this may be to all mothers reading). I think this sums up, in part, Newton's second law of thermodynamics. I have begun to wonder if this demonstration we are observing adheres to this principle. Is what we are seeing a demonstration of ever increasing chaos?

Initially I would say both yes and no, certainly not an appropriate scientific conclusion. From one perspective we are studying the concentration and accumulation of plastic in a "relatively" defined space, an organization. Conversely, with all the potential impact that the plastic may have here, are we providing all the necessary ingredients for "entropy" to increase. Finally, could it be that we are just observing plastic at one particular point in its life cycle, one initiated by man, and then it possibly dissolves back into nature? And, what are all the consequences, or even benefits, that could come of that?

The ocean has once again proven itself to be very complex. The heterogeneity is very apparent. Just yesterday, two tows which yielded 31 and 33 pieces bracketed a tow that resulted in 461 pieces of plastic (let me remind you of our previous tow which yielded 23,000 plus pieces). With this kind of sampling variation, one could imagine that it will take a lot more time and energy to get truly clued in to what goes on when a foreign synthetic material takes up residency here in the not so isolated oceanic ecosystem.

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For more from sea, listen to an interview with Chief Scientist Giora Proskurowski on the July 2, 2010 Science Update podcast, produced by AAAS.