A couple of days ago an engine strainer – a big metal strainer used to
filter the water taken in by the ship’s engine to cool itself – was taken off
for a weekly cleanup, and our engineers, knowing that we have an ecologist on
board, kindly suggested that I take a look.
It was strewn with technicolor plastic bits, as well as tiny living
beings that had got caught in the strainer during the week of filtering through
the ocean water at 6-meter depth.
I should
say, this unexpected strainer – frankly, I had no idea than an engine even had one
- gave me a much clearer vision of what is really happening in the water here than any of the samples I'd tried to look at before that.
Well, this part of the ocean appears to be sadly full of small-sized
plastic, even though you won’t see it when looking at the gorgeously,
impeccably blue water surface. It’s beautiful, by the way, how this principle
seems to hold for everything in life: looking just at the surface, more often
than not you are in for some very wrong conclusions.
These
plastic bits are submerged in the water column, and establishing the layer, or
the depth of their predominant concentration is very easy – one has to
simply filter through the chosen depth for a while - but not technically
available to me on this cruise.
What I will
have a chance to do, though, is take a good look at the strainer a couple more
times to see how much it accumulates every week while we’re steaming away northwards from the center of the Gyre.
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