You thought there were only 6 continents? Well no, your eyes did not deceive you, you read correctly. There are no longer 6 continents but 7. Not officially actually, let me explain.
But what could be this 7th continent? New lands virgin of all defilements discovered in a place unexplored by man? If you think about this, you are going to be very disappointed. If you thought about the North Pacific Ocean, with such a large concentration of plastic wastes that forms a gigantic layer of detritus that could be likened to a continent, then you are right!
The time when the oceans were one of the last places free from man's harmful effects on the planet is now over. 80% of marine pollution comes from land pollution. What is rejected in the rivers ends up being carried by the rivers feeding the oceans.
What we send into the pipes is not always well filtered by our water purification plants and it ends directly on the high seas. For example, the microscopic plastic beads present in our toothpaste, too small to be retained by the filters, end up in the ocean, and more exactly a tenth of the global plastic production end up like that in the ocean. About 6 million tons of plastic ends up this way, by disappearing from our view, but continues to pollute the sea for an unknown duration…
But that does not mean that the plastic will fragment and disappear by itself. It is even more dangerous since it is so much easier in this way to be ingested by the fishes and the birds that live in the open sea. They end up swallowing it thinking that it is a food, and then, end up choking themselves.
And as a reminder, in the food chain, it is we who end up eating the fishes, and therefore indirectly the plastic that we could not sort correctly.
Ok, let’s come back to our 7th continent. It is located under the surface of the sea, but is not invisible, like an iceberg basically. The surface of the water is concealed by small plastic debris almost everywhere. And from time to time we can meet drifting buoys and plastics. The plastic density in these waters is 300,000 fragments per km2, over thousands of thousands of miles around. With a total area of 3.5 million km2, the total weight of this flowing continent would be 17,500 tons. Which actually is the equivalent of the weight of about 200 blue whales, the largest and heaviest animal in the world.
These plastic continents are formed under the action of the marine currents, which when meeting and by creating opposing senses, they start to whirl together, and form what looks like a vortex that makes the plastic and all the elements which are driven by the marine currents finally stagnating in very precise points on the globe, in huge amounts. You can five not 1, but 5 of them today in the oceans. Woe to the paradisiacal islands which would then be on their way, which would welcome on their beach debris, toothbrushes, plastic bottles etc. This is, for example, the case in Tahiti or on the island of Easter.
Here is a video from Emma Bryce on TedTalks, talking about What happens to the plastic that we throw away without recycling it:
Here is another video about "How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic".
Let’s meditate on this.
Noémie.
Comments