'Washed Ashore' shows oceans' trashy side

A community project started by artist and educator Angela Haseltine Pozzi, the exhibit at the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands displays 15 massive sculptures of sea life. All of them are built from the 7,000 pounds of trash that “Washed Ashore” project members have gathered from a 20-mile stretch of Oregon’s coastline. The free exhibit is open to the public June 25-Oct. 15 at the center. Docent-led tours are available. “White plastic is the most common appearance,” Pozzi said last week at the exhibit, pointing out several other sculptures, including a whale’s ribcage made of milk cartons and other containers. “Lidia,” a harbor seal sculpture named for the cup lids she’s built from, will be touring various locations in the Bay Area throughout the four-month show. Mammals like seals and whales aren’t the only organisms to be harmed by trash in the water. Plastics aren’t biodegradable — they merely break into smaller and smaller pieces that are then ingested by zooplankton. By introducing harmful plastics to organisms at the base of the marine food chain, humans affect all creatures, including themselves. So whom can we blame? Another sculpture, “Flip-Flop Fish,” was created by remainder material flip-flops are cut out of, which is heedlessly discarded by the factories that make them. But factories aren’t the only culprits. As consumers, we’re all to blame. It is we, the supermarket shoppers, the plastic baggers, the coffee cup dumpers, etc., who are creating new continents of junk in the ocean. Luckily, “Washed Ashore” offers us tips to conserve and recycle alongside the sculptures. “We need to change the way we think,” said Jim Oswald, a Marine Mammal Center spokesperson. “We need to think twice about our habits, to look twice at our materials and ask ourselves what we can do.” Bringing a bag to the grocery store and a cup to the coffee shop is a good start, as is choosing glass containers over plastic ones. An even more direct approach is to start picking up trash on beaches.

Warming, Overfishing, Plastic Pollution Destroying Ocean Life ...

The state of the oceans can best be likened to a case of multiple organ failure in urgent need of intervention, suggests the most comprehensive analysis yet of the world's marine ecosystems.

Global warming, overfishing and plastic pollution are wreaking havoc at an unprecedented rate on marine life, reported scientists at a recent meeting of the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).

The impacts of climate change — acidifying oceans, coral bleaching and habitat loss — are the biggest cause of decline in ocean health, and the hardest to solve, some researchers told SolveClimate News in interviews.

Global warming will "swamp everything," said Tony Pitcher, a professor of fisheries from the University of British Columbia who attended the meeting. "The effects are all around … If we don't do something quickly, the oceans in 50 years won't look like they do today."

The workshop brought together 27 scientists from six countries and represents the first time in at least a decade when experts from separate fields — geochemists, geophysicists, pollution experts, fishery biologists and climate change scientists — gathered to share their assessment of the oceans.

"These people don't usually talk to each other very much so getting them together ... was quite a special occasion," said Pitcher.

But the scene was far from celebratory. "In each kind of science, the experts were reporting that somewhere in the world the worst-case scenario was already present," he told SolveClimate News.

The Next Great Extinction

Climate scientists continue to report that atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising at an accelerated rate, spelling trouble for the oceans. Seas absorb the heat-trapping gas, which makes them more acidic.

Acidity of the world's oceans has increased 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution, said Bärbel Hönisch, a professor of earth science at Columbia University who did not attend the workshop. Ocean acidification stresses corals, shellfish and other organisms with effects that ripple through the marine food chain.

Adding to that ocean stress is overfishing, the IPSO assessment said. The large and long-lived species in fisheries worldwide — and in the South China Seas in particular — are "virtually fished out," Pitcher explained.

When added together, conditions may be ripe for the next great extinction similar to the five mass extinctions that have occurred throughout Earth history. "That was the comparison that was made," said Pitcher. "Certainly the rate of change in the chemistry of the oceans is greater than in some of the ancient extinctions.

d complete list but accdg to NatGeo team, they also found plastic bags & diapers in our rich marine life :-/

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