The tragedy of Flight MH370 seems to have highlighted another issue that sailors have been talking about for years, but nobody else seems to have picked up on in this event, namely the catastrophic levels of junk that are starting to accumulate in our oceans. There have been discussions about the Pacific Garbage Patch that make the news from time to time and then people forget about it, but this tragedy seems to have shown that no matter how far from land, civilization and shipping routes you are, the oceans are full of floating junk at a concentration level that almost wherever you look it appears as if it could have been a catastrophic airline accident, but on closer inspection it turns out to be just another area of ordinary rubbish that we discard into the oceans every day. Early in the search they found enough oil floating in the sea that it appeared to be a disaster site, but when it turned out to be a normal ship dumping oil and not a plane crash, everybody forgot about it. Just another thing that ships do every day, dumping tons of oil into the sea. Flotsam turned up in the South China Sea, but it was all just normal, so has already been forgotten about. And then the search moved to the Southern Ocean, which is normally regarded as being one of the last pristine frontiers. and what happened? 20 March, satellites detected enough stuff floating around there that the search was refocused there. 22 March an object 22m x 13m (!!!) was identified 75 miles from the previous area of stuff. 24 March, another patch of rubbish found 400 miles away. 26 March, 122 items identified on satellite images, some of them 23m long!!! 27 March, 300 items identified 120 miles further south than the previous lot! 28 March, the searchers decided that all this stuff floating around in a pristine wilderness and looking sufficiently like the sites of several major airline crashes to warrant thorough searches, is in fact normal (?!), so they move the search area 680 miles further away to investigate another area of flotsam and jetsam. I hope and pray as much as everybody else that the searchers get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing aircraft and its passengers and crew, but I also hope that maybe some concerned people will start asking questions about the levels of junk floating around our oceans, and it will no longer be a case of out of sight, out of mind.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 10:58:26 +0000
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