New study helps explain how garbage patches form in the World’s oceans

Density of finite-size objects after 1.5 years of evolution starting from a uniform distribution under the combined action of simulated ocean currents and reanalyzed winds.

Credit: Beron-Vera, Olascoaga and Lumpkin

From University of Miami

A new study on how ocean currents transport floating marine debris is helping to explain how garbage patches form in the world’s oceans.
Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues developed a mathematical model that simulates the motion of small spherical objects floating at the ocean surface.
The researchers feed the model data on currents and winds to simulate the movement of marine debris. The model’s results were then compared with data from satellite-tracked surface buoys from the NOAA Global Drifter Program’s database.
Data from both anchored buoys and those that become unanchored, or undrogued, over time were used to see how each accumulated in the five ocean gyres over a roughly 20-year timeframe.
“We found that undrogued drifters accumulate in the centers of the gyres precisely where plastic debris accumulate to form the great garbage patches,” said Francisco Beron-Vera, a research associate professor in the UM Rosenstiel School’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences and lead author of the study.
“While anchored drifters, which are designed to closely follow water motion, take a much longer time to accumulate in the center of the gyres.”

 Global plastic concentration map based on data collected during the Malaspina 2010 circumnavigation and regional surveys.

Credit: Cozar, A., et al. (2014), Plastic debris in the open ocean, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA,

The study, which takes into account the combined effects of water and wind-induced drag on these objects, found that the accumulation of marine debris in the subtropical gyres is too fast to be due solely to the effect of trade winds that converge in these regions.
“We show that the size and weight of the drifters must be taken into account to fully explain the accumulation,” said Maria Josefina Olascoaga, an associate professor in the UM Rosenstiel School’s Department of Ocean Sciences and a co-author of the study.
The model could be used to track shipwrecks, airplane debris, sea ice and pollution among the many practical applications according to the researchers.
The study, titled “Inertia-induced accumulation of flotsam in the subtropical gyres,” was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The study’s authors are: Francisco Beron-Vera, Maria Josefina Olascoaga, and Rick Lumpkin from the NOAA Atlantic Oceanic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML).

Links :

• NPR : Pollution has worked its way down to the world's deepest waters
• The Guardian : 'Extraordinary' levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench 
• Washington Post : Scientists discover pollution 10,000 meters below the ocean’s surface in the Mariana Trench
• The Economist : The world’s deepest ocean trenches are packed with pollution
• Nature : Bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean fauna 
• Bangkok Post : 'Garbage island' will take 10 days to clear
  
• GeoGarage blog : 'Great Pacific garbage patch' far bigger than imagined ... / First of its kind map reveals extent of ocean plastic / Ocean garbage patch is mysteriously disappearing / How much plastic is in the ocean ?

The age of sail and European empire

The interactive timeline will be very useful during this activity and you can also download a smaller ‘Britain and the Sea 1650-1850 timeline’ from the bottom of this page.
 

From FutureLearn by Jesse Ransley

From the 16th century, European seafarers began to sail further west and then east.

Driven by the hope of commercial gain, by national interest and religious belief, these explorers discovered ‘new’ maritime routes and worlds.

These early ‘Voyages of Discovery’ were enabled by the new shipbuilding technologies of the late Medieval period and led to large-scale transoceanic trade and a newly-global movement of people, materials and ideas.

They also laid the foundations of vast European empires that lasted into the 20th century and had profound effects in shaping the world we inhabit today.

The history of European empires is a maritime one – one powered for hundreds of years by ships and sailors and by wind and sail.

This ‘Age of Sail’ (c.1600-1850) was a period of significant and rapid change in the scale, technologies, social world, politics and public importance of seafaring.

It was also the period when many of the political and legal institutions, scientific ideas, economic structures, and even geographic boundaries of the modern world developed.

There are hundreds of stories we could draw out from this period, but within this activity we will be looking specifically at Britain’s expanding maritime world in the Age of Sail.

The rest of the articles in ‘The Age of Sail and Global Seafaring’ provide examples from Britain’s maritime empire to draw out important stories, archaeological finds and developments in seafaring.

But first, here is a short overview of this important period.

'Bombay on the Malabar Coast belonging to the East India Company of England'. Engraving by Jan Van Ryne, published Robert Sayer, London, 1754.

© public domain; scanned by representatives of The British Library Board

The new ‘Atlantic World’

The period between about 1600 and 1850 saw the development of the collection of overseas colonies, trading posts and military strongholds that came to be known as the British empire.

English colonial interests were first focused across the Atlantic, on the colonies in the Caribbean and eastern seaboard of North America.

By the eighteenth century, in common with a number of European countries, Britain drew significant wealth from the sugar plantations of her Atlantic colonies.

These were worked by enslaved people trafficked across the Atlantic in European ships, via the slave trade. Goods, people and ideas all travelled along sea routes protected by the Royal Navy (from pirates as well as other European vessels), contributing to the economic and cultural interchanges that defined this British Atlantic world.

The Smithsonian has a very good online exhibition on the Atlantic World.

The Indian Ocean, the Pacific and Britain’s Empire in the East

From the early seventeenth century the East India Company, a speculative merchant joint-stock company, had traded valuable goods like porcelain, silk, indigo dye, salt and tea from Asia to the British Isles.

The Company initially established coastal trading posts in India through negotiation with local rulers.

‘India ships’ sailed annually from the British Isles utilising the Indian Ocean’s monsoon winds to reach the often-precarious outposts.

In the eighteenth century, as they grew and became increasingly embroiled in conflicts with local rulers and competing European powers, the British involvement in India came to be shaped as much by the control of territory as by trade.

In the late eighteenth century, while the British expanded their control over India, the American War of Independence led to the loss of Britain’s North American colonies and parliament discussed abolition of the slave trade.

The geographic focus (as well as the ‘purpose’) of Empire began to shift.

And as the eighteenth progressed into the nineteenth century, Britain expanded her interests in the East in new ways.

James Cook made voyages of ‘scientific discovery’ to the Pacific to pursue astronomical measurements in Tahiti, but also to further explore the Ocean.

Following his ‘discovery’ of Australia, the ‘First Fleet’ was dispatched to establish a penal colony, which led in turn to settler colonialism in Australia and latterly New Zealand.

Cartoon map showing monarchical France in the form of a sailing ship at sea.
Relief shown pictorially. - Also shows administrative divisions (departments).
Text, calendar, and map names in English. Index of departments in French. 
Title from first sentence of text at lower left. - "Published as the act directs, June 28th 1796, by the author, no. 49 Great Portland Street."
Paris meridian.
Watermark: 1794 J. Whatman. 
Available through the Library of Congress Web

Three Ocean Worlds

It is important to recognise that the ocean worlds of the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific that Europeans entered over this period were very different.

The geographies, weather systems, ocean currents and, most importantly, histories of each ‘ocean world’ were unique.

Though there was indigenous seafaring along and around the coasts and islands of the Atlantic, for example, there was no large transoceanic seafaring tradition.

In contrast, when Europeans first sailed around the Cape into the Indian Ocean they entered a complex, maritime world with a long history and established transoceanic trade routes, communities and technologies.

Whilst in the Pacific, Cook encountered an ocean world with a very different history of transoceanic voyaging and navigation.

The mechanisms and impacts of European exploration, trade and colonisation were, therefore, particular to each ocean world.

Maritime Archaeological Worlds

Finally, it is also important to remember the larger historical narratives of Britain’s maritime empire often focus on the lives of rich, European men.

Maritime archaeology can certainly provide important insights into the ‘big’ events and stories (both the celebrated and the infamous) of Britain’s Imperial past.

But it can also offer us glimpses into the everyday lives of sailors, migrants, convicts, indentured labourers and even slaves.

Shipwrecks and port archaeology present a window onto a world in motion – where all types of people and their possessions, goods and raw materials, and even ideas were on the move.

That means that if we explore this archaeology carefully, and ask the right research questions, we have the chance to better understand the lives of all types of people from all over the Empire, and thereby better understand our own world.

Links :

• University of Southampton : Shipwrecks and Submerged Worlds: Maritime Archaeology(free online course)

Pays des Abers

Pays des Abers - Vu du Ciel

 Pays des Abers with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical chart)

The man and the sea

The man & the sea from Andrew Kaineder

Free one's board from fins, and free one's self - the philosophy of one of Australia's great authentic surfers.
Presenting a stripped back portrait of Derek Hynd, shot in winter 2015, over 2 weeks at Jeffrey's Bay.

Solo skier on Antarctica misses his ship home

From May 6th, Mike Horn embarked on his next adventure, Pole2Pole.

Equipped with his sailing vessel Pangaea, he becomes the first person to undergo a unique circumnavigation of the globe via the two poles over land and sea.
After 57 days, 5100 km, 0 support, Mike Horn reaches the end of the Antarctic Continent
on the 7th of February at 22:50 UT
Photo: Dmitry Sharomov

From Seeker by Alyssa Danigelis

Nothing to do but just keep going and see what happens.
That's the carpe diem philosophy Swiss-South African explorer Mike Horn adopted on Antarctica late last week as his plans unraveled.
He found himself alone on ridged packed snow known as sastrugi, getting whipped by gusty winds, days away from reaching the coast.

 It takes very little to make a happy man happy!

Moving through hundreds of miles of ice now.
Pangaea taking a break on this wandering 'berg! November 29, 2016
Mike Horn describes his 110-foot sailing vessel, the Pangaea, as a 4x4 for the sea.
He has used the boat on 12 circumnavigations of the globe to reach incredibly remote, and oftentimes inaccessible, places - including his current Pole 2 Pole expedition to Antarctica.

Horn, 50, had set sail for Antarctica from Cape Town last November aboard his own two-mast, nearly 115-foot vessel the Pangaea.

He intended to ski solo and unsupported across the continent the long way, with occasional help from kites.
His ship's crew would come collect him from the coast.
Seemed like a good plan.
At the end of January, the race was on between Horn and the vessel to reach the coast first, he reported on his blog.

How explorer Mike Horn is surviving alone in Antarctica

But Horn hit bad weather, including whiteout conditions and wind that forced him to hunker down in his tent.
He stitched up his ripped kite and shoveled the snow building up around the tent.
"I have been in this position so long that it feels like I live here," Horn posted.
Then, last Thursday, Horn reported that the Pangaea suddenly had to return to Tasmania due to a big electrical problem.
He'll know more once they arrive there, he added.
I'd be more scared for Horn if I didn't know about his previous solo feats.

Latitude 0°

 Arktos expedition

The man swam the length of the Amazon River, walked the length of the Arctic and circumnavigated the globe around the equator without motorized transportation, to name a few.
He's also an accomplished mountaineer.

 at the South Pole
from Instagram

The traverse of Antarctica is part of Horn's Pole 2 Pole journey to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole, over land and sea, covering 24,000 miles and visiting six continents.
Horn began last May, sailing from Monaco to Namibia.
Horn and his wife Cathy originally planned this adventure years ago, but Cathy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and passed away in 2015.
To deal with the loss and honor her legacy, Horn and daughters Annika and Jessica went on an expedition together that year, driving from Europe to K2 basecamp, he told Men's Journal last October.
In Antarctica last Sunday, Horn noted on the Pole 2 Pole site that he'd hit gusty winds.
"What I can say is that at the end of the day it feels like you have been hit by a train over and over again, but what is important is to stand up each time," he wrote.
The following afternoon, he posted a Facebook update.
Horn was still about 50 miles from the coast without any flat terrain to be seen.
"As I drop in altitude, it has become icy and yesterday I spent 14 hours on my skis going over a hard and harsh wind-blown surface," he wrote.
No word yet on the status of the Pangaea but I have a feeling that a stretch of smoother sailing is in his future.

Links :

• Travel Pulse : Mike Horn’s Historic Trip Around The World Just Hit The South Pole 
• RedBulletin : Meet the world's greatest living explorer 
• L'Equipe : diaparama