Tag Archive for "ocean"
The British organization Marine Conservation Society want to ban balloon launches because balloons can entangle wildlife and the balloons are also being consumed which can result in death. Dead birds have been found with balloon remnants around their legs and the same thing happen to turtles eating the plastics. The problem is increasing as research shows that the number of balloons found at the shore has tripled since 1996.
To change this the organization has launched a campaign called “Don’t Let Go” where they want to spread awareness about the problem. Some places in UK has already banned releasing of balloons.
It should be pretty easy to avoid releasing balloons into the wild, but I guess many people don’t think about the harm that they can cause. Kudos to this organization for creating hype about the problem. Those of us that live close to the shore should take some time now and then, and pick up plastics that litter the seaside.
Seems like this blog is turning into a “Save the oceans” blog, but since it’s called “Musings from a male knitter” I’m gonna write about things that concern me and the oceans are very important to me.
Haven’t knitted in quite some time either..
In the middle of the northern parts Pacific Ocean the currents create a big vortex where a lot of the trash the we dump into the ocean get trapped. This place has been dubbed as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” and there is even a Wikipedia page about it. This would not be a very big problem if all we did was dumping organic waste, but every single day we throw tons of plastic and other toxic materials into the ocean.
A site called vbs.tv decided to sail into this remote part of the ocean and see for themselves what the garbage patch looked like. They also had some scientists with them to test the contents of the ocean.
They have created a 12 part video series about the trip that you can see here.
I have embed part 1 of the video into this blog post, but check out the rest of the parts too. Be warned, there is some cussing in the videos.
We need to put heavy pressure on our governments so they will clean up this patch and the rest of the oceans for that matter. We also need to figure out how to change the common view of the ocean being a big waste dump. One thing that we can do ourselves is start picking up all the trash that litter our coastline. Every little thing helps 🙂
