By Patrick Cassidy, STAFF WRITER
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BARNSTABLE — When a giant orange buoy was
found on Sandy Neck Beach last week, crowds gathered. A shipwreck that landed on
Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet four months ago drew thousands to view its
skeletal remains.
But these dramatic wash-ups are merely a fraction of the
tons of detritus that finds its way onto area beaches. It is also far from the
most dangerous material adrift in the world's oceans, according to
researchers.
Most of the garbage on local beaches does not draw a throng
of people and is far less historic than a century-old shipwreck. Plastic bags,
deflated balloons and cigarette butts lack the star power of a mystery buoy or a
stranded dolphin or whale.
The quantity of plastic and other debris littering the
planet's oceans appears to be growing, though, according to Bamford and others
who are scrambling for clues about where the troublesome trash comes from and
what to do about it.
In many cases the source is likely nearby, Bamford said.
"It seems a lot of it is domestic," she said. "I'm not sure that it's being
transported across the ocean to our shores."
Oceans of junk
In 2001 lab waste from Boston-area schools was found washed
up on Chatham beaches.
Fishing gear makes up much of the debris found on and near
New England beaches, Bamford said. If the gear is left to float, it may be a
dangerous trap for fish and marine mammals such as the right whales in Cape Cod
Bay, Bamford said.
Another source of oceangoing trash is container ships, many
of which ply the waters off Cape Cod. A ship off Nantucket in 1997 lost 23
containers overboard, including one with a car inside and another with candy
that eventually washed ashore on the east side of the island.
In 1995 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 13
million pounds of manmade material is lost in the world's oceans each year, but
that is likely a conservative estimate and difficult to update, Bamford
said.
The trash that makes it onshore is typically very different
from what is found submerged just offshore, she said.
But the extent of the debris problem in the Atlantic Ocean
is less understood than the problem in the Pacific Ocean. Over the past 10 years
researchers have studied trash trapped in a current-crafted vortex in the
Pacific.
"We thought, and others also thought, the collection area
was twice the size of Texas," said Marieta Francis, acting executive director
for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a nonprofit California-based
research group that specializes in ocean debris.
Algalita's founder, Capt. Charlie Moore, first discovered
vast amounts of plastic and other litter suspended in the ocean north of Hawaii
in 1997.
Since then Algalita researchers have documented debris
concentrated in two areas of the Pacific known as gyres. A gyre is a pile of
water pushed together into a large vortex by winds and currents, according to
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle-based expert on tracking material that washes up
onshore.
The North Atlantic has two large gyres in which garbage
collects, Ebbesmeyer said. Close to the Cape another, smaller gyre exists that
stretches from around New Jersey in an elliptical pattern to an area east of
Nova Scotia. Separated from the Gulf Stream current, New England's gyre keeps
debris that enters the ocean here from being dragged out into the middle of the
Atlantic, Ebbesmeyer said.
"Garbage is going to tend to be trapped back in your area,"
he said. "It doesn't get flushed out."
Mystery marker
The Sandy Neck buoy's origin remains a mystery. It was sold
through a distributor, according to Jerry Thermos, president of Marine Fenders
International, the company that made the buoy. But the buoy was probably sold to
someone in the southeastern U.S., he said. For all anyone knows this buoy was in the gyre off New
England, Ebbesmeyer said. "We just don't know."
If it were left to degrade, it would break down into a
"trillion pieces," much like the other small pieces of plastic afloat on the
world's oceans, he said.
Those small pieces could pose a significant threat to
marine animals, according to Carol "Krill" Carson, a Middleboro marine biologist
who gives nature talks on the Captain John boats out of Plymouth.
"Some animals directly go for the stuff because they think
it's a food item," Carson said.
Other animals, like baleen whales and the basking shark
that Carson studies, merely filter the water for phytoplankton.
"If there's anything floating in that water like any kind
of plastic marine debris," Carson said, "I have a feeling it goes in the
mouth."
The impact on birds and other marine animals of ingesting
plastic is still unclear, Carson
said.
