A fascinating and highly readable report on discovery of a huge shortfall in plastic floating around in ocean – bad as what is there may be – got a load of media response this week. The research paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and largely by researchers in Spain, is in Grist below along with two press releases that moved it along.
First, the story that brought the whole patch of stories onto the tracker-scope is from a new news outlet associated with The Atlantic. I don’t remember having encountered it, but it is an example of how far digital media have gone beyond being merely on the internet and not using paper as a medium.
- Quartz – Gwynne Guilford: 99% of the plastic we throw in the ocean has mysteriously disappeared ; The writer or somebody went to all the trouble of embedding a video in this just to show a young Dustin Hoffman getting the advice, “Plastics”, from The Graduate. That is some extravagant bit of devotion to multi-media cultural allusion. Guilford’s bio says she is a general reporter and editor and indicates an eclectic journalism history.
The story is polished in style, breezy and not entirely serious. It cites no specific researcher or institution. It does not identify the journal although it does link to the paper at PNAS. One finds nothing on the epic expedition that gathered the data.
The news here is that after a diligent four-vessel global filter-trawling expedition, researchers discovered that there not only is not as much plastic out there as expected, the shortage at a size range of plastic bits – less than about 1 or 2 mm across – is particularly low. Scientists already knew that most plastic at sea is in small pieces, not big plastic turtle-choking bags and polyethylene laundry baskets festooned with mussels. Now it appears as though chemical and biological fragmentation of the plastic goes along as expected statistically but only down to a certain size. Then poof it’s gone. It presumably is leaving the surface and going somewhere – perhaps in the poop of fish or marine snow or sunk by accumulated biofilms or something. So far the large team of researchers is just guessing. Guilford however does not push the issue much, just listing some of the hypotheses as presented in the paper without elaboration or query to any of the authors.
The Quartz outlet, by the way, appears set up (it is part of The Atlantic media company) specifically for people who read their news on iPads and other such small devices. Standard PC-optimized websites are so passe, you know. Here is its about us page with more info.
It also says on its site that it is looking for a health/medical writer and a technology writer to hire.
Other stories of the missing oceanic plastic:
- AP – Malcolm Ritter: Ocean plastic pollution may be less than expected ; With an outside expert’s comment – which is that this may be the first-ever effort to actually measure how much plastic is at the ocean’s surface.
- Science (AAAS) Angus Chen: Ninety-nine percent of the ocean’s plastic is missing ; Solid job, just what you expect in Science.
- Motherboard – Jason Koebler: Hundreds of Thousands of Tons of Plastic Are Missing Somewhere in the Ocean ; A good enough essay and reflection on what the paper says, but no evident reporting to get outside what it and its authors say.
- The Verge – Rich McCormick: plastic has gone missing ;
- Al Jazeera America – Renee Lewis: Plastic debris contaminates 88 percent of ocean’s surface, report says ; Lewis missed the boat on this one. The more common and better angle is that so much is missing. The story appears to rely mainly on the press release from Spain (see Grist below), which is pretty much useless as it does not even mention the main theme of the paper in PNAS – the sea’s puzzling plastic sink.
- Forbes – Paul Rodgers: The Mystery Of The Missing Ocean Trash ;
Grist for the Mill: Spanish Nat’l Research Council (via EurekAlert!) Press Release, Univ. of Western Australia Press Release, PNAS Paper.
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