Planet or plastics : what happens to the plastic we throw away, a teachers toolkit

We are drowning in plastic—click to enlarge!
Map by Jason Treat, National Geographic

From National Geographic

Scroll through how tons of trash travels from inland trash heaps to oceanic garbage patches. (National Geographic)

Use our terrific activities to follow the “tremendous travels of trash” and the “perils of plastic.”

Discussion Ideas
How does so much trash end up in the middle of the ocean?- directly.
Trash is often accidentally dumped directly into the ocean from shore or, more often, from ships.
Most plastic in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is discarded industrial fishing gear.
Container ships also lose tons of cargo in the ocean every year, as they are tossed and turned by hazardous high seas and unsecured containers slip overboard.
Use our activity “Mapping Ocean Currents” to understand how a 1992 cargo ship spill ended up dumping nearly 92,000 rubber ducks into the Pacific Ocean.
- indirectly.
Most marine debris is actually land-based, and ends up in the ocean indirectly.
“Rainwater ushers mismanaged waste from land into local waterways, which feed into larger tributaries and rivers, which in turn empty into oceans.
In this way, plastic from far inland can travel many miles to the coastline.”
According to some sources, just ten rivers contribute 95% of river-based ocean pollution.

These plastic bottles illustrate how humans discard a shocking amount of plastic waste into the environment.

Most ocean plastic is labeled “mismanaged plastic waste.”
What is mismanaged plastic waste?
“Mismanaged plastic waste is defined as waste that doesn’t make its way to proper receptacles, either intentionally or accidentally.”

Mismanaged plastic waste tends to be higher in the developing world. Why?
Many developing countries are more likely to lack a centralized waste-disposal system.
Manila, Philippines, for example, is the urban area addressed in the Nat Geo article.
Manila “has a metropolitan garbage-collection system that stretches across 17 separate local governments—a source of chaos and inefficiency.
In 2004 the region was already running out of land to safely dump garbage.
The shortage of landfill space, and thus the crisis, continues today.”
The Pasig River, which runs through Manila and feeds Manila Bay, is one of the most polluted waterways on Earth.

 June next issue of @NatGeo
see National Geographic

Once plastic enters a marine environment, how does it travel thousands of miles through the open ocean?
- ocean currents and gyres.
The ocean is a network of currents, cycling nutrients and energy around the world. It can cycle plastic, too.
Take a look at our map for a lovely outline of ocean currents.
Tides and currents transport debris to ocean gyres.
Gyres are powerful currents that rotate in enormous circles.
Waste that is caught in a gyre spins in relatively stable areas, known as ocean “garbage patches.” Take a look at our beautiful map of the ugly problem of the five gyres.

How can individuals prevent plastic pollution?
Take the pledge. Sign up to receive helpful tips from National Geographic about how to reduce single-use plastics.
Consume less plastic. Reduce the amount of single-use plastics you consume: water and soda bottles, straws, plastic bags, coffee stirrers, lids, laminated plastic containers.
A huge amount of food packaging is single-use plastic.
Make smart decisions about buying products with excess packaging—try to avoid those cute individual containers held within larger containers.
Recycle. In addition to recycling plastics that you use, try to actively look for products made from recycled materials.
Think globally, act locally.
See how your local community is relying on single-use plastic, and try to address that specific issue.
Are students filling garbage bins with plastic packaging from lunch?
Does your school have mismanaged plastic waste? Use our activity to help guide a school-site cleanup and apply its lessons in a global context.
Are neighborhood coffee shops offering incentives to customers who bring their own cups and straws?
Does your school have a recycling program?
Are local grocery and convenience stores offering incentives to encourage customers to bring their own bags?
How permeable are the storm drains in your neighborhood?
Do they effectively filter out large plastic trash?
This could be a great Geo-Inquiry project.
Vote. Support local, state, and federal laws that encourage conservation and punish pollution.
Support local, state, and federal representatives who make protecting the environment a part of their platform.
Contact your local officials to ask how they are working to reduce our reliance on plastics, and help them come up with local solutions to local problems.

TEACHERS TOOLKIT

Nat Geo : Source to Sea
Nat Geo: What Happens to the Plastic We Throw Out?
Nat Geo: The Tremendous Travels of Trash
Nat Geo: Perils of Plastic
Nat Geo: Mapping Ocean Currents
Nat Geo: Marine Debris: A Legacy of Litter
Nat Geo: Plastic Accumulation in Ocean Gyres
Nat Geo: Planet or Plastic? Take the Pledge
Nat Geo: The Geo-Inquiry Process

Links :

• The Guardian : Point Nemo is the most remote oceanic spot – yet it’s still awash with plastic
• Smithsonian : Even the Deepest Parts of the Ocean Are Polluted With Startling Amounts of Plastic
• PopMechanics : Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of the Mariana Trench 
• CS Monitor : Global sailing race spotlights plastic pollution in oceans
• FT : Stop our oceans choking on a plastic overdose 
• BigBlueOceanCleanUp

Book of a lifetime: Atlas Maior, by Joan Blaeu

"Google Maps of the 17th century"

under the hammer in Brussels on May 25th (lot 710) (Arenberg Auctions)

It is a first edition from 1662 and contains a total of eleven volumes.

These contain 592 hand-painted maps - plus over 3,000 pages with descriptions of the continents, regions and countries shown.
The atlas was considered the most expensive book of its time.

The value of the issue offered by a private collector is estimated at 250,000 to 350,000 euros.
According to Aarenberg, only twelve editions are known in public collections worldwide.
see digital reproduction of the book

Working for the Dutch East India Company, Joan Blaeu produced a vast atlas with hundreds of baroque maps gracing thousands of pages.

"He's the last of a tradition: the single, brilliant, magician-like mapmaker who says, 'I can magically show you the entire world,'" Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London says.

"By the late 17th century, with joint stock companies mapping every corner of the world, anonymous teams of people are crunching data and producing maps."

Blaeu's market-oriented maps weren't cutting-edge.

But he did break with a mapmaking tradition dating back to Ptolemy of placing the earth at the center of the universe.

At the top of the map, the sun is at the center of personifications of the five known planets at the time—in a nod to Copernicus's theory of the cosmos, even as the earth, divided into two hemispheres, remains at the center of the map, in deference to Ptolemy (Ptolemy is in the upper left, and Copernicus in the upper right).

"Blau quietly, cautiously says I think Copernicus is probably right," Brotton says.

 For less fortunate collectionners, see book

(video) 

or better the facsimile edition of the Blaeu-Van der Hem Atlas

Links :

• New Atlas : The 50 most valuable scientific documents of 2017
• The Atlantic : 12 Maps That Changed the World 
• The Independant : Book of a lifetime: Atlas Maior, By Joan Blaeu

Government of Canada introduces new measures and enters into new partnerships for safer maritime navigation and emergency response through the Oceans Protection Plan

Canadian nautical charts in the GeoGarage platform

From Transport Canada

Canada’s coasts support Indigenous and coastal communities, enable international trade, are home to precious ecosystems, and play a key role in strengthening the economy and growing our middle class.
The Government of Canada’s $1.5 billion Oceans Protection Plan—the largest investment ever made to protect our coasts and waterways—is building a world-leading marine safety system and will lead to cleaner and safer coasts.

Today, the Honourable Marc Garneau, Minister of Transport announced four measures to help protect Canada’s waters and coastlines as part of the Oceans Protection Plan.
These measures are:
Providing $110 million over five years for the Canadian Hydrographic Service to chart 23 high-priority commercial ports and near-shore areas along all three coasts to create safer navigation for mariners.
This new investment will fill important gaps in critical areas across the country that currently have limited and out-of-date navigational information, and give mariners high-resolution electronic navigation charts, navigational products and data for increased safety.
To date, surveys of eight out of the 23 ports have been completed.

Adding seven additional coastal communities (nine total) to test a new information system showing where ship traffic is located—and other essential maritime information—as part of the Enhanced Maritime Situational Awareness initiative.

The selection of a contractor to build a system that can provide near-real time data on local ship traffic will be one of the largest agile procurement projects in the Government of Canada’s history.
Indigenous and coastal communities, Transport Canada and the Canadian Coast Guard will work together to award the contract.
Through the $62.5 million invested in the Enhanced Maritime Situational Awareness initiative, the Government of Canada will make $9.8 million available over two years to support the implementation of these pilot project communities and work with them to develop, test and evaluate the new system.
Awarding an initial contract to Hercules SLR of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to supply the Canadian Coast Guard with two vessel-based emergency tow kits, plus equipment and training.
This initial contract is valued at more than $180,000, and is part of a plan to install tow kits and related equipment on all large Canadian Coast Guard vessels, including five vessels on the West Coast.
The initial contract includes options for up to 62 additional tow kits and related equipment.
Allocating $7.2 million over five years in the Marine Weather Information Services Demonstration Project.
This project will deploy five smart buoys (two on the west coast and three on the east coast) that will produce data for tailored weather forecasts.
These smart buoys will have innovative high resolution weather prediction systems that will enhance marine forecasting and improve marine navigation and safety for mariners.

Brazil DHN layer update in the GeoGarage platform

10 nautical raster charts updated & 5 new charts added

see GeoGarage news 

This autonomous glider could one day roam the oceans in packs

The UNAv, a wind-powered UAV for ocean monitoring: performance, control and validation 

from Gabriel Bousquet

The work takes inspiration from the flight of the albatross to conceive an autonomous flying robot able to extract its energy from the winds of the ocean.

The ultimate motivation is that if energy is extracted from winds there is no need for refueling, so a robotic albatross could survey and study the oceans for weeks or months at a time, traveling tens of thousands of kilometers in a single mission.

From Silicon Republic by Colm Gorey

In an effort to better monitor the world’s oceans, a team from MIT has built a super-efficient glider, similar in design to an albatross.

The vastness of the world’s oceans makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to effectively monitor a large body of water, and while satellites have certainly helped, we have yet to find an effective Earth-based solution.

But now, a team from MIT has unveiled its latest creation based on the gliding power of the common seabird known as the albatross.

Engineers at MIT have developed a new model to simulate dynamic soaring, and have used it to identify the optimal flight pattern that an albatross should take in order to harvest the most wind and energy.

They found that as an albatross banks or turns, it should do so in shallow arcs, keeping almost to a straight, forward trajectory.

The first aspect of the research, the “model reduction step”, consists in deconstructing the physics of the albatross’ flight (called “dynamic soaring” in the field) in order to extract fundamental and general laws. 
-see article on dynamic soaring-

This step, which involves physical and mathematical analysis, flight dynamics, aerodynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and trajectory optimization, aims at identifying which aspects of the problem matter and which don’t, in order to generate a simple model of predictive power.

Model reduction is important when designing innovative systems, because often the design space is not well understood and very large; it is also helpful in numerous flavors of machine learning.

The autonomous glider is capable of skimming along the water’s surface in a glide similar to an albatross and is also capable of riding the waves like a sailboat.

The second aspect of my research, the “design and demonstration step” is about adapting the lessons learnt from the model reduction step in order to imagine and demonstrate a robot that combines the solutions found by biological systems with the capabilities of man-made systems.

More precisely, I propose a general framework for a bioinspired robot, characterize the design space and provide the underlying science and engineering for further developments.

I then demonstrate the most innovative and critical aspects of the system with a prototype.

This involves the design, fabrication/implementation and test of mechanical systems (the robot and test environment), electrical systems (sensors, actuators and communication), the embedded software (estimation and control algorithms), and their integration.
-Photo: Gabriel Bousquet-

‘The oceans remain vastly under monitored’

When dropped into a region of high wind, it is designed to stay aloft, and when the winds are calmer can become a sea-faring vessel.

Borrowing from both nautical and biological designs, the craft can cover a determined distance using one-third as much wind as an albatross, while travelling 10 times faster than a typical sailboat can as it weighs just under 3kg.

“The oceans remain vastly under monitored,” said Gabriel Bousquet who led the design of the robot as part of his graduate thesis.

“In particular, it’s very important to understand the Southern Ocean and how it is interacting with climate change. But it’s very hard to get there. We can now use the energy from the environment in an efficient way to do this long-distance travel, with a system that remains small-scale.”

 An albatross glider skims the Charles River.

Roaming in packs

The design came about last year after Bousquet and a number of other researchers looked into the dynamics of albatross flight to better understand how the bird could travel huge distances without exerting enormous amounts of energy.

The team found that the physics of the bird’s flight is very similar to that of sailboat travel as they both transfer momentum in order to keep moving.

In terms of speed, the craft should only need relatively calm winds of about five knots to zip across waters at a velocity of about 20 knots, equal to around 37kph.

Once the design was agreed upon, it was then a matter of adding the hardware which includes GPS, inertial measurement sensors, auto-pilot instrumentation and ultrasound to track the height of the glider above the water.

The team’s goal is to one day have a design which will allow for packs of these speedy skimmers to be deployed to cover huge areas of an ocean.

Links :

• MIT : Albatross robot takes flight / Engineers identify key to albatross’ marathon flight
• Engadget : MIT's autonomous drone is equal parts albatross and sailboat
• Techristic : Albatross Robot Takes Flight
• The Royal society : The albatross as a flying sailboat