Upstream | June 07, 2009 | 15 comments

Search for Air France Flight 447 Hindered By Garbage

source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/search_for_air.php

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Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic ocean near Brazil this week. Rescue workers and officials are pessimistic that they will find the downed craft or the black box. The first major obstacle was that the aircraft was not on radar went it went down. That meant rescue workers had to look for floating debris and work their way back to the plane.

John Perry Fish of American Underwater Search and Survey on Cape Cod

They'll have to work with flotsam. You get the wind and current data and work back. You have to distinguish between the light material that is on the surface and exposed to the wind, and the buoyant material, which is floating, but just under the surface and not exposed to the winds.

But the ocean is in that area is so garbage-filled that rescue workers are having trouble locating any signs of the plane among the floating piles of waste.


Finding Garbage While Looking For Debris

Earlier in the week, rescue workers reported that they had found debris--two buoys and a cargo pallet--that had come from the plane, but it turned out to just be floating garbage. Officials worry that the trash will make it too difficult to locate the downed craft from the air. They plan to send in submarines as a last resort.

Trash Islands in Our Oceans

Ocean-bound refuse tends to congregate in gyres. There are about five major “trash islands” in the world. One of them, between North America and Asia, is twice the size of Texas. Air France Flight 447 did not go down in one of these major gyres. It fell into an area of minor trash congestion.

Ocean Life Disrupted By Garbage

Plastic waste accounts for 90% of all the waste in our oceans. It has a devastating impact on ocean life. Notably, sea turtles mistake the plastic bags for jellyfish and try to eat them. Birds also attempt to eat the floating chunklets of plastic.

The floating-garbage problem doesn't stop at marine life. The plastic acts as a sponge for harmful chemicals. The chemicals work their way through the food chain and end up in our food.
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15 comments // Search for Air France Flight 447 Hindered By Garbage

  • mjn
  • chmk
    • 0
      chmk  

    • Can someone tell me where people just dump trash into the ocean. Or is this just an unofficial common practice that I'm unaware of?

    • 2 years ago
  • Saladin
    • 0
      Saladin  
    • chmk:

      A lot of third world countries don't bother to have even the most basic of environmental standards.

      Russia, for instance, fucking just dumps its nuclear waste right into the arctic ocean.

      Also, a lot of stuff just straight up falls off of supertankers. That's what caused that huge of mass of plastic to collect in the pacific gyre.

    • 2 years ago
  • chmk
  • charfman
  • mymountain
  • idealist
    • 0
      idealist  

    • i allways thought that a series of giant nets could be pulled through the water and we could clean up the mess in the ocean. and then ummm launch it into space!... twoards the sun!
      sigh" i cant beleive how bad our oceans are.
      calvin and hobbes would be pissed!

    • 2 years ago
  • kiko_64
  • KeineReue
    • 0
      KeineReue  

    • I know they are kinda busy with the task at hand, but is anyone attempting to remove this garbage while they are at it ? Just a thought....

    • 2 years ago
  • Vierotchka
  • KeineReue
  • superfinet
    • 0
      superfinet  
    • KeineReue:

      Where would it go? The same amount of trash will still exist, just somewhere else. Sure for the sake of looking for crash debris they could displace some of the trash eliminating it from the search grids, but the equipment necessary may not be had.

    • 2 years ago
  • KeineReue
    • 0
      KeineReue  
    • KeineReue:

      maybe i'm just dumb, but judging from the pic up above there could be a lot of recyclables. *shrug* or maybe you guys are right and our generation will just end up like fry's off of futurama and we wil try to solve the problem in another way like sending garbage out into space so we don't have to deal with it. *shrug* It's just a thought, trying to clean it up. I'm not a scientist, I don't have any graphs or charts behind my theory. The readers and creators of current are highly intelligent people, I just thought maybe someone would have some helpful ideas or imput.

    • 2 years ago
  • vistapoint
  • Jeffnfun631
    • 0
      Jeffnfun631  

    • The worlds largest Garbage Dump the Atlantic Ocean. I sure hope they can find what they are looking for and put an end to this terrible tragedy

    • 2 years ago
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