According to a new study published inNature Geoscience, the Antarctic icesheets could disintegrate much faster than anticipated, reports Reuters. East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009. The rate speeded up from 2006. Previous estimates projected anywhere between a 4 gigatonne per year loss and a 22 gigatonne per year gain. As Jianli Chen, one of the study's authors from the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Space Research, told Reuters,
the key result is that appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions, since 2006. This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future.
You might have heard of those huge patches of plastic that float in the world's oceans. These are our society's debris, carpets of plastic bottles, caps, plastic straws - and lots of those tiny little plastic pieces used in peeling creams.
Most of the marine debris in the world is comprised of plastic materials. The average proportion varies between 60 to 80% of total marine debris. In many regions, plastic materials constitute as much as 90 to 95% of the total amount of marine debris. Nearly 80% of marine debris comes from land-based sources,
writes the Conservation Science Institute. They are huge. One, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, contains approximately 3.5 million tons of trash, doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. Charles Moore, environmentalist and self-ttrained oceanographer, who discovered it in 1997, later wrote in an essay for Natural History,
...as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere...
Here is a TED-talk with James Moore, careful, there are some pretty nasty pictures of what plastic can do...
He went to talk about it to Charles Ebbesmayer, maybe the world's leading expert on flotsam. Ebbesmayer, who lives in California, tracks the world's trash on its journey through the oceans. He has written a book on his experience with beachcombing and a life tracking flotsam - and what it can teach us about the sea and our relation to it.
