What is Digg?Sponsored by HowLifeWorks
How Smart Guys Keep Their Faces Looking Young view!
howlifeworks.com - Why men have finally started to use certain anti-aging skin care products...
198 Comments
- mparker21311, on 09/25/2009, -0/+112I wonder if George Carlin was right.
The Earth created us because it wanted plastic. - drastik21, on 09/25/2009, -2/+75Lets just put it on a rocket and shoot it up in space like they did in Futurama.
- MMusick, on 09/25/2009, -3/+68I believe this was the first documentary on the Pacific Garbage Gyre. A very good watch.
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/toxic/toxic-garbage-island ... - llamasnotsheep, on 09/25/2009, -0/+47Anyone else notice that this is basically just the wikipedia entry shortened down and placed around a poop-colored swirl?
- ertz, on 09/25/2009, -2/+34http://rorr.im/
- dagnabbit, on 09/25/2009, -4/+35It's not actually a "large patch of floating plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean." It's not an "island", otherwise we could just scoop it up and out. It's an area about twice the size of Texas that contains a lot of garbage, much of it on the ocean floor. Common sense people.
- DirtPile, on 09/25/2009, -0/+30The garbage gyres and gimbles in the wabe. This makes the mome raths outgrabe, too.
- malex, on 09/25/2009, -0/+27No, the problem is how to clean it up too.
These are microscopic polymers saturating hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of seawater. A fishing net ain't gonna do it. - odnaryperson, on 09/25/2009, -0/+24heyyyy. easy, i am one of those
- RealmDown, on 09/25/2009, -0/+24Extra points for street view...
- arunforce, on 09/25/2009, -6/+29We always needed an 8th continent.
/s
I'm no marine biologist, but I'm thinking that this won't be THAT hard to clean up, but the damage done by it to marine life will be undoable. - TeeJae09, on 09/25/2009, -2/+23It's not the problem of how to clean it up, but WHO will clean it up. (Sadly)
- hurried, on 09/25/2009, -2/+20It is a big deal that there is this much garbage floating in the ocean. Just because you can't see it from a satellite doesn't mean it isn't there - as scientists have pointed out, much of it is on the ocean floor - and it is becoming a toxic part of the food chain for sea life. How would you feel it it was floating in your backyard, or coming up into your basement? Or you had to wade through it when grocery shopping? I bet it would be a big deal then and you'd be screaming at some government agency to clean it up! But apparently some of you feel that since you don't live in the ocean, it's no big deal.... very selfish attitude. And the main point is not just that it is there, but how it got there, and how we are going to keep it from getting worse. Keep in mind, just a mere 200 years ago there wasn't ANY pollution in the oceans. You might think 200 years is a long time - but in comparison to the age of the world, it is a very short time in which we have turned that which was pristine into garbage dumps. In just 200 years we've gone from clean water to getting pamphlets handed to us at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles warning us not to eat fish from most of our rivers and in my town, we had to have our blood checked for a chemical additive pumped into our water system by the area's largest employer. Of course, that's no big deal either, if it's not in YOUR bloodstream. Sometimes I wish I could just take a crap on the lawns of people who don't think the environment is worth protecting. But THAT would be illegal. I guess this is what you can expect from a society that has to be told not to read text messages while they drive.
- Hodor, on 09/25/2009, -2/+17gyre-normous
- Cyborg771, on 09/25/2009, -17/+32Don't believe everything you see on Digg guys.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4132 - TWallaceWD, on 09/25/2009, -2/+17For an article with the word PIC in the title, I find this lacking in pictures.
- JugularJuice, on 09/25/2009, -13/+27***** humans.
- lhbaker, on 09/25/2009, -5/+19I find it distrubing that there are people who will deny virtually any environmental issue, regardless of scientific data. Fortunately, the garbage patch can be proven to exist, yet these same people are inclined not to believe it unless there is a picture. If you give them a picture, they will insist the picture is fake. Even if you can prove its existence, they will deny that it is harmful to the environment.
These people have no problem accepting the existence of a voyeuristic angry man in the sky, but they become more and more defensive when you present them with scientific data.
Science is not a political movement. - charlietuna, on 09/25/2009, -0/+14Did you read the article? Did you understand that the trash is thinly spread over regions larger than the state of Texas (shown for scale). These gyres are not visible easily by satellite.
Have you ever done manual labor -- even with power equipment? Ever see a landfill being run, and the amount of truck traffic to haul and cover the trash daily? The work in keeping debris out of the trees?
Cleaning up that crap would be real work my friend, and it is being replenished continually. - PWoT, on 09/25/2009, -1/+14Yes it is absolutely impossible for anything that lives in water to ever go extinct. That's what renewable means, right?
I mean, fishing in the ocean is as good as it's ever been. Wait a second... - Snoogs, on 09/25/2009, -0/+12I doubt Google decided to provide hi-res imaging over an otherwise empty spot in the ocean.
- RealmDown, on 09/25/2009, -0/+12If you doing alternatives, we DON'T want to know.
- k3nnyd, on 09/25/2009, -2/+13Sure, there isn't a massive area of the ocean where you can't see the water cause its so full of plastic. People seem to think this is what this garbage patch is. The reality is that every ocean gyre (think whirlpool) traps garbage inside of it and there are 5 big ones on the planet. If you took a ship to them and then ran a dredge behind to collect debris, you would get lots of plastic and other crap. If you caught the fish there and dissected their stomachs, pretty much all of them would contain undigestable plastic that screws up their digestive tracks and could easily lead to an unnatural death.
You can argue that plastic will eventually break down in the ocean but that would only be the plastic that is exposed to the sun enough. Lots of plastic isn't floating and is deep underwater where it will stay pretty much forever. Animals will eat small chunks and when they die those plastics will eventually be washed from the rotted corpse and ate again and again. And even when plastics do break down, what do you think they break down into? A bunch of toxic chemicals is what. It's basically causing runaway bio-accumulation that could have terrible consequences in the future. Too bad for us humans that usually don't care about anything unless it directly effects our minuscule ~70 year lives. - FritoPendejo, on 09/25/2009, -5/+16That was entirely too full of factual reporting of events and reasonable conclusions. It lacks the emotional and philosophical hatred of self needed to be popular in this forum.
- nebbo, on 09/25/2009, -5/+16There is plastic and other trash in the ocean water, but there is not a giant mass creating an "island of garbage".
They are over hyping the issue and doing themselves a disservice by perpetuating this myth. - Cyborg771, on 09/25/2009, -0/+10Yeah because an acidic sea sounds so much more environmentally friendly...
- carbonetc, on 09/25/2009, -2/+12What really burns me is that if we do get our act together and actually manage to minimize the consequences of the last century, these people will ***** all over the millions of man-hours of hard work that went into saving their asses and claim, "See! The world is still ok! We were right, there was no problem to begin with!"
- Cepster, on 09/25/2009, -2/+12It's not people's fault for taking what these poeple are saying at face value. That is the garbage that is being shoved down our throats (excuse the pun). Alarmists need to realize that telling the truth would be a lot more effective than their extremist *****
- verkon, on 09/25/2009, -0/+10You've seen the consequences, it will someday come back.
- ousthouse, on 09/25/2009, -2/+11So... what's the point of the (PIC)???
- TheAssuager, on 09/25/2009, -1/+9No really, why not?
- bundwallah, on 09/25/2009, -3/+11Lots of articles about this but no actual picture of the damn thing?
- Khirzask, on 09/25/2009, -0/+8Except out there in the middle of the ocean, the water is several miles deep. About a billionth of a percent of surface sunlight penetrates there. Plastic that sinks to the bottom will be there forever.
- Snoogs, on 09/25/2009, -1/+9I think that's just called "Texas".
- iCosmos84, on 09/25/2009, -0/+8Weisman wrote about this in "The World Without Us" (awesome read btw). It's the largest human-made mass on the planet and it may outlast our most seemingly permanent structures. In case you're interested in further reading, here's a (massive) Google Books link:
http://books.google.com/books?id=UEt_xWoju_MC& ... - sgnpkd, on 09/25/2009, -1/+9Are you gonna stay away from fish forever smartass?
- dpknc84, on 09/25/2009, -2/+10Bringing it to the top as the site's struggling:
http://rorr.im - Silverhawk773, on 09/26/2009, -0/+7shoot it into the sun?
- Retrodigg123, on 09/25/2009, -0/+7also known as credit cards or australian dollars
- TurtlesInTime, on 09/25/2009, -0/+7That's stupid.
- malex, on 09/25/2009, -2/+9If you don't think it's scary enough already, you don't know how to read.
- malex, on 09/25/2009, -0/+7Read the first paragraph.
- carbonetc, on 09/25/2009, -0/+6It's not even an article. How can you be too lazy to read little captions around a picture?
- sipsyrup, on 09/25/2009, -0/+6Credit cards?
- Otto, on 09/25/2009, -0/+6It does exist, but it's not like it is some solid floating mass of plastic. Here's why:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2893/why- ... - jasvll, on 09/25/2009, -2/+8@Cyborg771
Where, exactly do the two sources conflict? - cosworth99, on 09/25/2009, -1/+7My friend sailed through this in the summer on his way to Tahiti. No, you can't walk on it. No, you can't see it on Google maps. Can you go an hour and not see garbage sailing along? Not really. It really changed his thoughts about sailing and making sure they don't let anything go overboard.
My time in Turks & Caicos saw a lot of time on deserted beaches. The flotsam and jetsam was immense. Humans are just lazy and don't think when chucking something in the water. - Snoogs, on 09/25/2009, -1/+7That's like saying you are really stupid, and also bad at reasoning skills. They are not mutually exclusive, and the statement works in Hurried's case... and mine as well.
- RealmDown, on 09/25/2009, -0/+6Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked." - Ubermann, on 09/25/2009, -0/+6Since most pieces are under 1mm in size - I don't think it will look like a big trash dump it is made out to be.
-
Show 51 - 100 of 204 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is