Deep Sea News is a blog by marine scientists covering ocean life, science, and environmental issues.
HN commenters cite it for expert criticism of The Ocean Cleanup, notably from oceanographer Kim Martini, and for its explainer on Fukushima ocean radiation.
This project is hugely problematic, both because there are some pretty fundamental flaws in how he characterizes plastic pollution and the lack of any responses from the Ocean Cleanup about the criticism from just about every ocean plastics expert out there. None of the major plastics pollution nonprofits endorse this work, not out of jealousy but frustration with an idea getting so much attention and funding purely because some charismatic kid has talked about it.
Assuming that it is engineered to survive storms (which is DEFINITELY not an easy feat given the design), anything like this will have an impact on marine life. Anything that floats like this will act like a FAD (fish aggregating device) and attract animals, and should be designed in a way to minimize impact or incidental catch. It seems like his discussion about what that includes has been pretty vague to date. This includes the small things in the ocean that will certainly be harmed by this device.
The dispersion of plastics in the ocean seems to follow a different profile than this device addresses. Contrary to what people imagine when they think of the “Pacific Garbage Patch,” the bulk of plastic in the oceans is not large pieces that are floating. Pretty much all plastic in the ocean has broken down into small pieces and sits through the entire water column following the mixed layer phenomenon. There’s been a lot of great research on that, including microplastics which are now found in practically every…
The map of Lactase Hotspots is pretty interesting. My family comes from the State of Gujarat in India, one of the darker (70%+) regions in the map. The "White Revolution"[1] was started in the 70s by independent dairy farmers in the district our village belongs to. The Gujarati and neighboring Rajasthani diet has always included milk and byproducts as a significant ingredient. The 3m+ milk producers supplying milk to the dairy cooperative Amul [2] have made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. I highly doubt this would've happened if the region was 30%-40% dark like the rest of India.
Similar to how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline [3], this small genetic mutation has affected the entire world's economy, especially agriculture-based industries. Once we enter the post-natural-selection era where we can select the DNA of our offspring, I wonder how different will the long-term future be.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
[3] http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/
Hmm, now I want to get to the bottom of this.
This article from deepseanews contradicts sections of this:
http://deepseanews.com/2010/06/the-jones-act-and-the-oil-spill-not-what-you-think/
As far as I can tell, foreign-flagged vessels can operate, but only if they're at least three miles offshore and (more importantly) have their crews replaced by Americans. I can see how this could cause problems, not only because vessel owners might be reluctant to hand over their vessels to new crews but because the new crews might not be experienced at operating them.
There are definitely fifteen foreign-flagged vessels participating in the cleanup, but fifteen isn't very many. Is it not true that the Jones Act is preventing more from showing up? It still seems like a completely insane set of restrictions.
Because I ended up doing a bit of reading about dolphins earlier this week, I thought I'd share a bit of trivia in this thread: dolphins also have prehensile penises. (Like an elephant's nose) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1l9V6Lfe2uE
And they're also not-very-nice (Tongue firmly in cheek here. Of course animals do not possess human qualities like "nice" or "asinine") http://deepseanews.com/2013/02/10-reasons-why-dolphins-are-aholes/
Now that we know they have names and are able to make tools, this has to make them one of the most unique species on the planet aside from man. Wonder what would have happened had they just invented some form of writing?
No, they did not get answered by Slat in the comments. Are we reading the same article?
Dr. Kim Martini is a very respected oceanographer. While you may not like the tone of the article, she knows what she is talking about. Her concerns were not answered, she just thanked him for replying. Here's a later followup article, so it is clear these concerns have not been resolved.
http://www.deepseanews.com/2017/01/what-did-the-boyan-slat-and-the-ocean-cleanup-do-last-summer/
Every time this project comes up and actual scientists point out the issues, even people who generally trust scientists seem to be very hostile to criticism of the project.
I love that Fast Company is the linked article. FC ran the work of actual marine plastics researcher eight years ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/1680455/miriam-goldstein-north-pacific-garbage-patch
She's had a running criticism of Slat's project since it first got press, publicly on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MiriamGoldste/status/413093769714483200
https://twitter.com/MiriamGoldste/status/490196011219185664
And thanks for linking to DSN, which also ran this debunk on Slat's scale test: http://www.deepseanews.com/2017/01/what-did-the-boyan-slat-and-the-ocean-cleanup-do-last-summer/