To address the growing issue of microplastics in the Great Lakes, we need to curb our consumption

Microplastics in the environment is a growing global problem.
(Shutterstock)

You would be hard-pressed to find a corner of the world free from microplastics, plastic particles measuring less than five millimetres. They contaminate our drinking water, accumulate in the food we eat and have been found in the human body, including in blood, organs, placenta, semen and breast milk.

In April, delegates from across the world came together in Ottawa for the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop a legally binding international treaty on plastic pollution. The meeting offered a unique opportunity to identify strategies for addressing the human and environmental health impacts of plastics, including microplastics.

But do we really know what it would take to mitigate the rising amounts of microplastics in the environment?

In the Great Lakes, plastic pollution along the shorelines poses a major challenge: 86 per cent of litter collected on Great Lakes beaches is either partially or completely composed of plastic. This is worrisome, given the lakes supply 40 million people with drinking water and represent a combined GDP of US$6 trillion. Yet, recent studies show levels of microplastics reaching up to thousands of particles per cubic metre in some areas of the lakes.

CBC News takes a look at the amount of microplastics in the Great Lakes.

Mismanaged plastic waste

Improving waste management alone is unlikely to address microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Consider one of the most common pieces of litter on a beach: a 500 ml plastic bottle. If that bottle is not picked up and placed in a landfill or recycled, over the years it will break down into microplastics; the complete disintegration of the bottle into 100 micrometre size particles would produce 25 million microplastics.

Based on reported concentrations of microplastics and water flow rates of the Great Lakes, we can estimate the yearly amounts of plastic that need to be entering the lakes to match the concentrations of microplastics currently observed.

For Lake Superior, this adds up to the same mass of plastic contained in 1,000 bottles. But Lake Superior is the cleanest of the Great Lakes. For Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie and Ontario, the corresponding estimates are 3,000, two million, 18,000, and nine million bottles, respectively.

According to the Canadian government’s own estimation, Canadians living in the Great Lakes Basin throw away more than 1.5 million tons of plastic waste each year, equivalent to 64 billion 500 ml bottles. If we include the United States, the total amount of plastic waste in the Great Lakes Basin rises to 21 million tons per year (or 821 billion 500 ml bottles).

For Canada and the U.S., the fraction of mismanaged plastic waste that leaks into the environment because it is not recycled, incinerated or landfilled is estimated to be between four and seven per cent.

According to our calculations, this means that it would take less than 0.001 per cent of the total mass of plastics consumed annually within the Great Lakes Basin to generate the number of microplastics present in the lakes. In other words, just 0.02 per cent of the mismanaged plastic waste already explains the microplastic concentrations in the Great Lakes — the other 99.8 per cent ending up as macro- to micro-sized litter in soils, waterways, ponds, beaches and biota.

plastic rubbish on the ground with driftwood
Plastic garbage on the shore of Lake Erie.
(Shutterstock)

What these calculations imply is that the shedding of even very minor, and arguably unavoidable, microplastic particles over the lifetime of a product can lead to significant accumulations of environmental microplastics, including in areas far removed from their source.

While better plastic waste management can help alleviate microplastics pollution, we should not count on it to bring down the microplastics concentrations in all five Great Lakes.

Curbing pollution

Microplastic pollution comes not only from plastic litter in the environment, but also from plastic that is thrown in the trash bin. Even long-lived plastics, such as those that are used in the construction industry, shed microplastics through natural wear and tear.

Once they enter an ecosystem, microplastics become extremely difficult and expensive to clean up. Recycling is the best option currently available, but even this process has been shown to produce microplastics.

At present, less than 10 per cent of plastic is recycled worldwide. With plastic production predicted to triple by 2060, achieving a fully circular plastic economy — where all plastic produced is recycled without shedding microplastic particles — faces huge economic, social, environmental and technological challenges.

And it would take many years to establish such a system, all while microplastic pollution continues to worsen. If we are serious about reducing microplastics concentrations in the environment, the reasonable course of action would be to start reducing plastic production and consumption now.The Conversation————————————

This blog is co-written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Dr Lewis Alcott, Lecturer in Geochemistry, University of Bristol; Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Research Associate Professor, Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo; Nancy Goucher, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist, University of Waterloo; Philippe Van Cappellen, Professor of Biogeochemistry and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Ecohydrology, University of Waterloo, and Stephanie Slowinski, Research Biogeochemist, University of Waterloo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Are you a journalist looking for climate experts for COP28? We’ve got you covered

COP28 logo

We’ve got lots of media trained climate change experts. If you need an expert for an interview, here is a list of our experts you can approach. All media enquiries should be made via Victoria Tagg, our dedicated Media and PR Manager at the University of Bristol. 

Email victoria.tagg@bristol.ac.uk or call +44 (0)117 428 2489.

Climate change / climate emergency / climate science / climate-induced disasters

Dr Eunice Lo – expert in changes in extreme weather events such as heatwaves and cold spells, and how these changes translate to negative health outcomes including illnesses and deaths. Follow on Twitter/X @EuniceLoClimate.

Professor Daniela Schmidt – expert in the causes and effects of climate change on marine systems. Dani is also a Lead Author on the IPCC reports.

Dr Katerina Michalides – expert in drylands, drought and desertification and helping East African rural communities to adapt to droughts and future climate change. Follow on Twitter/X @_kmichaelides.

Professor Dann Mitchell – expert in how climate change alters the atmospheric circulation, extreme events, and impacts on human health. Dann is also a Met Office Chair. Follow on Twitter/X @ClimateDann.

Professor Dan Lunt – expert on past climate change, with a focus on understanding how and why climate has changed in the past and what we can learn about the future from the past. Dan is also a Lead Author on IPCC AR6. Follow on Twitter/X @ClimateSamwell.

Professor Jonathan Bamber – expert on the impact of melting land ice on sea level rise (SLR) and the response of the ocean to changes in freshwater forcing. Follow on Twitter/X @jlbamber

Professor Paul Bates CBE – expert in the science of flooding, risk and reducing threats to life and economic losses worldwide. Follow on Twitter/X @paul_d_bates

Dr Matt Palmer – expert in sea level and ocean heat content at the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Bristol. Follow on Twitter/X @mpclimate.

Professor Guy Howard – expertise in building resilience and supporting adaptation in water systems, sanitation, health care facilities, and housing. Expert in wider infrastructure resilience assessment.

Net Zero / Energy / Renewables

Dr Caitlin Robinson – expert on energy poverty and energy justice and also in mapping ambient vulnerabilities in UK cities. Caitlin will be virtually attending COP28. Follow on Twitter/X @CaitHRobin.

Professor Philip Taylor – Expert in net zero, energy systems, energy storage, utilities, electric power distribution. Also Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Bristol. Follow on Twitter/X @rolyatlihp.

Dr Colin Nolden – expert in sustainable energy policyregulation and business models and interactions with secondary markets such as carbon markets and other sectors such as mobility. Colin will be in attendance in the Blue Zone at COP28 during week 2.

Professor Charl Faul – expert in novel functional materials for sustainable energy applications e.g. in CO2 capture and conversion and energy storage devices.  Follow on Twitter/X @Charl_FJ_Faul.

Climate finance / Loss and damage

Dr Rachel James – Expert in climate finance, damage, loss and decision making. Also has expertise in African climate systems and contemporary and future climate change. Follow on Twitter/X @_RachelJames.

Dr Katharina Richter – expert in decolonial environmental politics and equitable development in times of climate crises. Also an expert on degrowth and Buen Vivir, two alternatives to growth-based development from the Global North and South. Katarina will be virtually attending COP28. @DrKatRichter.

Climate justice

Dr Alix Dietzel – climate justice and climate policy expert. Focusing on the global and local scale and interested in how just the response to climate change is and how we can ensure a just transition. Alix will be in attendance in the Blue Zone at COP28 during week 1. Follow on Twitter/X @alixdietzel.

Dr Ed Atkins – expert on environmental and energy policy, politics and governance and how they must be equitable and inclusive. Also interested in local politics of climate change policies and energy generation and consumption. Follow on Twitter/X @edatkins_.

Dr Karen Tucker – expert on colonial politics of knowledge that shape encounters with indigenous knowledges, bodies and natures, and the decolonial practices that can reveal and remake them. Karen will be in attending the Blue Zone of COP28 in week 2.

Climate change and health

Dr Dan O’Hare – expert in climate anxiety and educational psychologist. Follow on Twitter/X @edpsydan.

Professor Dann Mitchell – expert in how climate change alters the atmospheric circulation, extreme events, and impacts on human health. Dann is also a Met Office Chair. Follow on Twitter/X @ClimateDann.

Dr Eunice Lo – expert in changes in extreme weather events such as heatwaves and cold spells, and how these changes translate to negative health outcomes including illnesses and deaths. Follow on Twitter/X @EuniceLoClimate.

Professor Guy Howard – expert in influence of climate change on infectious water-related disease, including waterborne disease and vector-borne disease.

Professor Rachael Gooberman-Hill – expert in health research, including long-term health conditions and design of ways to support and improve health. @EBIBristol (this account is only monitored in office hours).

Youth, children, education and skills

Dr Dan O’Hare – expert in climate anxiety in children and educational psychologist. Follow on Twitter/X @edpsydan.

Dr Camilla Morelli – expert in how children and young people imagine the future, asking what are the key challenges they face towards the adulthoods they desire and implementing impact strategies to make these desires attainable. Follow on Twitter/X @DrCamiMorelli.

Dr Helen Thomas-Hughes – expert in engaging, empowering, and inspiring diverse student bodies as collaborative environmental change makers. Also Lead of the Cabot Institute’s MScR in Global Environmental Challenges. Follow on Twitter/X @Researchhelen.

Professor Daniela Schmidt – expert in the causes and effects of climate change on marine systems. Dani is also a Lead Author on the IPCC reports. Also part of the Waves of Change project with Dr Camilla Morelli, looking at the intersection of social, economic and climatic impacts on young people’s lives and futures around the world.

Climate activism / Extinction Rebellion

Dr Oscar Berglund – expert on climate change activism and particularly Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the use of civil disobedience. Follow on Twitter @berglund_oscar.

Land / Nature / Food

Dr Jo House – expert on land and climate interactions, including emissions of carbon dioxide from land use change (e.g. deforestation), climate mitigation potential from the land (e.g. afforestationbioenergy), and implications of science for policy. Previously Government Office for Science’s Head of Climate Advice. Follow on Twitter @Drjohouse.

Professor Steve Simpson – expert marine biology and fish ecology, with particular interests in the behaviour of coral reef fishes, bioacoustics, effects of climate change on marine ecosystems, conservation and management. Follow on Twitter/X @DrSteveSimpson.

Dr Taro Takahashi – expert on farminglivestock production systems as well as programme evaluation and general equilibrium modelling of pasture and livestock-based economies.

Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello – expert on tensions and intersections between livestock farming and the environment.

Air pollution / Greenhouse gases

Dr Aoife Grant – expert in greenhouse gases and methane. Set up a monitoring station at Glasgow for COP26 to record emissions.

Professor Matt Rigby – expert on sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. Follow on Twitter @TheOtherMRigby.

Professor Guy Howard – expert in contribution of waste and wastewater systems to methane emissions in low- and middle-income countries

Plastic and the environment

Dr Charlotte Lloyd – expert on the fate of chemicals in the terrestrial environment, including plasticsbioplastics and agricultural wastes. Follow on Twitter @DrCharlLloyd.

Cabot Institute for the Environment at COP28

We will have three media trained academics in attendance at the Blue Zone at COP28. These are: Dr Alix Dietzel (week 1), Dr Colin Nolden (week 2) and Dr Karen Tucker (week 2). We will also have two academics attending virtually: Dr Caitlin Robinson and Dr Katharina Richter.

Read more about COP on our website at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot/what-we-do/projects/cop/
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This blog was written by Amanda Woodman-Hardy, Communications and Engagement Officer at the Cabot Institute for the Environment. Follow on Twitter @Enviro_Mand and @cabotinstitute.

Watch our Cabot Conversations – 10 conversations between 2 experts on a climate change issue, all whilst an artist listens in the background and interprets the conversation into a beautiful piece of art in real time. Find out more at bristol.ac.uk/cabot/conversations.

Nearly a quarter of people in the UK flush wet wipes down the toilet – here’s why they shouldn’t

Shutterstock/BigLike Images

Charlotte Lloyd, University of Bristol

Whether you’re cleaning your house, your car or your child, there are a variety of wet wipes manufactured for the job. Wet wipes are small, lightweight and extremely convenient. They have become a staple in most of our lives, particularly so during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

But according to Water UK, an organisation representing the water industry, flushing wet wipes down the toilet is responsible for 93% of sewer blockages and costs around £100 million each year to sort out. And the majority of these wipes, about 90%, contain plastic.

Water UK also found that 22% of people admit to flushing wipes down the toilet, even though most of them knew they posed a hazard. And it’s estimated that 300,000 sewer blockages occur every year because of “fatbergs”, with wet wipes one of the main causes.

But it seems wet wipes could soon be banned in England – well, at least the ones that contain plastic – as the government has said it will launch a public consultation on wet wipes in response to mounting concerns about water pollution and blockages. This follows pledges made by major retailers, including Boots and Tesco, to discontinue the sale of such products.

Market projections show that 1.63 million tons of material will be produced in 2023 for wet wipes globally – an industry worth approximately $2.84 billion (£2.04 billion). Though these figures are likely to be on the conservative side as manufacturers increased the production of disinfecting wipes in 2020 during the pandemic – and have remained at the same level since.

Despite the popularity and wide use of wet wipes, not a lot is known about their environmental footprint. This is because manufacturers are not obliged to state what the wipes are made from on the packaging, only the intentionally added ingredients. This creates a challenge for both scientists and consumers alike.

What we know

Wet wipes are made from non-woven fibres that are fused together either mechanically or with the aid of chemicals or heat. The individual fibres can be made from either natural (regenerated cellulose or wood pulp) or petroleum-based (plastic) materials, including polyester and polypropylene.

Most wet wipes are a mixture of natural and synthetic fibres – and the majority contain plastic. As well as the fibres, wet wipes also contain chemicals, including cleaning or disinfecting agents which are impregnated into the material.

Wet wipes, disinfecting wipes.
Wet wipes can cause a lot of issues for our sewerage system.
JoyImage/Shutterstock

Some wipes are designed to be “flushable” and contain chemical binding agents that are designed to release the fibres of the wipe when they are exposed to water. This means that if wipes are not disposed of correctly, they can create both a plastic and a chemical hazard to the environment.

It’s well known that plastic breaks down extremely slowly and persists for centuries in landfill. And if plastic-containing wipes are released into the environment – either through littering or via the sewerage system – they can pose a number of hazards.

The plastic problem

When wet wipes reach the environment – including soil, rivers and the ocean – they generate microplastic pollution in the form of microfibers. Microfibers are one of the most prevalent types of plastic pollution in the aquatic environment and affect ecosystems as well as potentially human health through their introduction into the food chain.

The problem has been exacerbated by these “flushable” wipes. One study identified seven different types of plastics as potential components of flushable wipes – meaning that they still risk being a source of microplastic pollution. Recent work has confirmed that wet wipes (along with sanitary products) are an underestimated source of white microfibers found in the marine environment.

Data on the environmental impact of the associated chemicals is lacking, but this is something my research group is currently working on. What is known though is that plastics have the ability to absorb other contaminants such as metals and pesticides as well as pathogens. And this provides a way for pollution to be transported large distances through the environment.

Flushable wipe going down the toilet.
Are flushable wipes really flushable?
Shutterstock/nito

Driven by environmental concerns as well as impending legislation, many plastic-free wipe products are now available or being developed. But even products made from natural fibres can still pose a problem to sewerage systems and so safe disposal – in a bin – is key.

The scientific evidence surrounding the environmental effects of bio-based plastics (plastics made from non-petroleum sources such as corn or potato starch) is also lacking, so caution is needed when thinking about simply switching from petroleum-based to bio-based plastics.

With this in mind, reusable washable products are a great alternative to disposables and have a much smaller environmental footprint. They are particularly handy around the home when washing is convenient.

That said, there will remain a market for disposables, but manufacturers should have to clearly label what the wipes are made from so that consumers can make a more informed choice.The Conversation


This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Dr Charlotte Lloyd, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow and Lecturer in Environmental Chemistry, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Charlotte Lloyd
Dr Charlotte Lloyd

The social animals that are inspiring new behaviours for robot swarms

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Termite team.
7th Son Studio/Shutterstock

From flocks of birds to fish schools in the sea, or towering termite mounds, many social groups in nature exist together to survive and thrive. This cooperative behaviour can be used by engineers as “bio-inspiration” to solve practical human problems, and by computer scientists studying swarm intelligence.

“Swarm robotics” took off in the early 2000s, an early example being the “s-bot” (short for swarm-bot). This is a fully autonomous robot that can perform basic tasks including navigation and the grasping of objects, and which can self-assemble into chains to cross gaps or pull heavy loads. More recently, “TERMES” robots have been developed as a concept in construction, and the “CoCoRo” project has developed an underwater robot swarm that functions like a school of fish that exchanges information to monitor the environment. So far, we’ve only just begun to explore the vast possibilities that animal collectives and their behaviour can offer as inspiration to robot swarm design.

Swarm behaviour in birds – or robots designed to mimic them?
EyeSeeMicrostock/Shutterstock

Robots that can cooperate in large numbers could achieve things that would be difficult or even impossible for a single entity. Following an earthquake, for example, a swarm of search and rescue robots could quickly explore multiple collapsed buildings looking for signs of life. Threatened by a large wildfire, a swarm of drones could help emergency services track and predict the fire’s spread. Or a swarm of floating robots (“Row-bots”) could nibble away at oceanic garbage patches, powered by plastic-eating bacteria.

A future where floating robots powered by plastic-eating bacteria could tackle ocean waste.
Shutterstock

Bio-inspiration in swarm robotics usually starts with social insects – ants, bees and termites – because colony members are highly related, which favours impressive cooperation. Three further characteristics appeal to researchers: robustness, because individuals can be lost without affecting performance; flexibility, because social insect workers are able to respond to changing work needs; and scalability, because a colony’s decentralised organisation is sustainable with 100 workers or 100,000. These characteristics could be especially useful for doing jobs such as environmental monitoring, which requires coverage of huge, varied and sometimes hazardous areas.

Social learning

Beyond social insects, other species and behavioural phenomena in the animal kingdom offer inspiration to engineers. A growing area of biological research is in animal cultures, where animals engage in social learning to pick up behaviours that they are unlikely to innovate alone. For example, whales and dolphins can have distinctive foraging methods that are passed down through the generations. This includes forms of tool use – dolphins have been observed breaking off marine sponges to protect their beaks as they go rooting around for fish, like a person might put a glove over a hand.

Bottlenose dolphin playing with a sponge. Some have learned to use them to help them catch fish.
Yann Hubert/Shutterstock

Forms of social learning and artificial robotic cultures, perhaps using forms of artificial intelligence, could be very powerful in adapting robots to their environment over time. For example, assistive robots for home care could adapt to human behavioural differences in different communities and countries over time.

Robot (or animal) cultures, however, depend on learning abilities that are costly to develop, requiring a larger brain – or, in the case of robots, a more advanced computer. But the value of the “swarm” approach is to deploy robots that are simple, cheap and disposable. Swarm robotics exploits the reality of emergence (“more is different”) to create social complexity from individual simplicity. A more fundamental form of “learning” about the environment is seen in nature – in sensitive developmental processes – which do not require a big brain.

‘Phenotypic plasticity’

Some animals can change behavioural type, or even develop different forms, shapes or internal functions, within the same species, despite having the same initial “programming”. This is known as “phenotypic plasticity” – where the genes of an organism produce different observable results depending on environmental conditions. Such flexibility can be seen in the social insects, but sometimes even more dramatically in other animals.
Most spiders are decidedly solitary, but in about 20 of 45,000 spider species, individuals live in a shared nest and capture food on a shared web. These social spiders benefit from having a mixture of “personality” types in their group, for example bold and shy.

Social spider (Stegodyphus) spin collective webs in Addo Elephant Park, South Africa.
PicturesofThings/Shutterstock

My research identified a flexibility in behaviour where shy spiders would step into a role vacated by absent bold nestmates. This is necessary because the spider colony needs a balance of bold individuals to encourage collective predation, and shyer ones to focus on nest maintenance and parental care. Robots could be programmed with adjustable risk-taking behaviour, sensitive to group composition, with bolder robots entering into hazardous environments while shyer ones know to hold back. This could be very helpful in mapping a disaster area such as Fukushima, including its most dangerous parts, while avoiding too many robots in the swarm being damaged at once.

The ability to adapt

Cane toads were introduced in Australia in the 1930s as a pest control, and have since become an invasive species themselves. In new areas cane toads are seen to be somewhat social. One reason for their growth in numbers is that they are able to adapt to a wide temperature range, a form of physiological plasticity. Swarms of robots with the capability to switch power consumption mode, depending on environmental conditions such as ambient temperature, could be considerably more durable if we want them to function autonomously for the long term. For example, if we want to send robots off to map Mars then they will need to cope with temperatures that can swing from -150°C at the poles to 20°C at the equator.

Cane toads can adapt to temperature changes.
Radek Ziemniewicz/Shutterstock

In addition to behavioural and physiological plasticity, some organisms show morphological (shape) plasticity. For example, some bacteria change their shape in response to stress, becoming elongated and so more resilient to being “eaten” by other organisms. If swarms of robots can combine together in a modular fashion and (re)assemble into more suitable structures this could be very helpful in unpredictable environments. For example, groups of robots could aggregate together for safety when the weather takes a challenging turn.

Whether it’s the “cultures” developed by animal groups that are reliant on learning abilities, or the more fundamental ability to change “personality”, internal function or shape, swarm robotics still has plenty of mileage left when it comes to drawing inspiration from nature. We might even wish to mix and match behaviours from different species, to create robot “hybrids” of our own. Humanity faces challenges ranging from climate change affecting ocean currents, to a growing need for food production, to space exploration – and swarm robotics can play a decisive part given the right bio-inspiration.The Conversation

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dr Edmund Hunt, EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow, University of BristolThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Edmund Hunt

Unless we regain our historic awe of the deep ocean, it will be plundered

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Image credit: BBC Blue Planet

In the memorable second instalment of Blue Planet II, we are offered glimpses of an unfamiliar world – the deep ocean. The episode places an unusual emphasis on its own construction: glimpses of the deep sea and its inhabitants are interspersed with shots of the technology – a manned submersible – that brought us these astonishing images. It is very unusual and extremely challenging, we are given to understand, for a human to enter and interact with this unfamiliar world.The most watched programme of 2017 in the UK, Blue Planet II provides the opportunity to revisit questions that have long occupied us. To whom does the sea belong? Should humans enter its depths? These questions are perhaps especially urgent today, when Nautilus Minerals, a mining company registered in Vancouver, has been granted a license to extract gold and copper from the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Though the company has suffered some setbacks, mining is still scheduled to begin in 2019.

Blue Planet’s team explore the deep. Image credit BBC/Blue Planet

This marks a new era in our interaction with the oceans. For a long time in Western culture, to go to sea at all was to transgress. In Seneca’s Medea, the chorus blames advances in navigation for having brought the Golden Age to an end, while for more than one Mediterranean culture to travel through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the wide Atlantic was considered unwisely to tempt divine forces. The vast seas were associated with knowledge that humankind was better off without – another version, if you will, of the apple in the garden.

If to travel horizontally across the sea was to trespass, then to travel vertically into its depths was to redouble the indiscretion. In his 17th-century poem Vanitie (I), George Herbert writes of a diver seeking out a “pearl” which “God did hide | On purpose from the ventrous wretch”. In Herbert’s imagination, the deep sea is off limits, containing tempting objects whose attainment will damage us. Something like this vision of the deep resurfaces more than 300 years later in one of the most startling passages of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), as a trip underwater in a diving bell figures forth the protagonist’s desire for occult, ungodly knowledge.

An early diving bell used by 16th century divers. National Undersearch Research Program (NURP)

Mann’s deep sea is a symbolic space, but his reference to a diving bell gestures towards the technological advances that have taken humans and their tools into the material deep. Our whale-lines and fathom-lines have long groped into the oceans’ dark reaches, while more recently deep-sea cables, submarines and offshore rigs have penetrated their secrets. Somewhat paradoxically, it may be that our day-to-day involvement in the oceans means that they no longer sit so prominently on our cultural radar: we have demystified the deep, and stripped it of its imaginative power.

But at the same time, technological advances in shipping and travel mean that our culture is one of “sea-blindness”: even while writing by the light provided by oil extracted from the ocean floor, using communications provided by deep-sea cables, or arguing over the renewal of Trident, we perhaps struggle to believe that we, as humans, are linked to the oceans and their black depths. This wine bottle, found lying on the sea bed in the remote Atlantic, is to most of us an uncanny object: a familiar entity in an alien world, it combines the homely with the unhomely.

Wine bottle found in the deep North Atlantic. Laura Robinson, University of Bristol, and the Natural Environment Research Council. Expedition JC094 was funded by the European Research Council.

For this reason, the activities planned by Nautilus Minerals have the whiff of science fiction. The company’s very name recalls that of the underwater craft of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), perhaps the most famous literary text set in the deep oceans. But mining the deep is no longer a fantasy, and its practice is potentially devastating. As the Deep Sea Mining Campaign points out, the mineral deposits targeted by Nautilus gather around hydrothermal vents, the astonishing structures which featured heavily in the second episode of Blue Planet II. These vents support unique ecosystems which, if the mining goes ahead, are likely to be destroyed before we even begin to understand them. (Notice the total lack of aquatic life in Nautilus’s corporate video: they might as well be drilling on the moon.) The campaigners against deep sea mining also insist – sounding not unlike George Herbert – that we don’t need the minerals located at the bottom of the sea: that the reasons for wrenching them from the deep are at best suspect.

So should we be leaving the deep sea well alone? Sadly, it is rather too late for that. Our underwater cameras transmit images of tangled fishing gear, cables and bottles strewn on the seafloor, and we find specimens of deep sea animals thousands of metres deep and hundreds of kilometres away from land with plastic fibres in their guts and skeletons. It seems almost inevitable that deep sea mining will open a new and substantial chapter on humanity’s relationship with the oceans. Mining new resources is still perceived to be more economically viable than recycling; as natural resources become scarcer, the ocean bed will almost certainly become of interest to global corporations with the capacity to explore and mine it – and to governments that stand to benefit from these activities. These governments are also likely to compete with one another for ownership of parts of the global ocean currently in dispute, such as the South China Sea and the Arctic. The question is perhaps not if the deep sea will be exploited, but how and by whom. So what is to be done?

A feather star in the deep waters of the Antarctic. BBC NHU
Rather than declaring the deep sea off-limits, we think our best course of action is to regain our fascination with it. We may have a toe-hold within the oceans; but, as any marine scientist will tell you, the deep still harbours unimaginable secrets. The onus is on both scientists and those working in what has been dubbed the “blue humanities” to translate, to a wider public, the sense of excitement to be found in exploring this element. Then, perhaps, we can prevent the deep ocean from becoming yet another commodity to be mined – or, at least, we can ensure that such mining is responsible and that it takes place under proper scrutiny.
The sea, and especially the deep sea, will never be “ours” in the way that tracts of land become cities, or even in the way rivers become avenues of commerce. This is one of its great attractions, and is why it is so easy to sit back and view the deep sea with awed detachment when watching Blue Planet II. But we cannot afford to pretend that it lies entirely beyond our sphere of activity. Only by expressing our humility before it, perhaps, can we save it from ruthless exploitation; only by acknowledging and celebrating our ignorance of it can we protect it from the devastation that our technological advances have made possible.-
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This blog is written by Laurence Publicover, Lecturer in English, University of Bristol and Katharine Hendry, Reader in Geochemistry, University of Bristol and both members of the University’s Cabot Institute. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Withdrawn: Reflections on the past and future of our seas

On the 23rd of August, and as part of Bristol 2015 European Green Capital, I have the privilege of participating in a conversation about the future of our coastal seas that has been inspired by Luke Jerram’s ethereal and evocative Withdrawn  Project in Leigh Woods.  The conversation will include Luke, but also the esteemed chef, Josh Eggleton  who has championed sustainable food provision and is providing a sustainable fish supper for the event, and my University of Bristol Cabot Institute colleague, Dani Schmidt, who is an expert on the past and current impacts of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems.

My engagement with Withdrawn has been inspired on multiple levels, primarily the enthusiasm of Luke but also arising from my role as Cabot Director and my own research on the oceans. Withdrawn inspires reflection on our dependence on the sea and how we have polluted and depleted it, but also on how we obtain our food and the people at the heart of that industry.

All of these issues are particularly acute for our island nation, ringed by nearly 20,000 kilometres of coastline and culturally and economically dependent on the sea. Beyond our own nation, over 2.6 billion people  need the oceans for their dietary protein, a point driven home when I interviewed Sir David Attenborough on behalf of Cabot (see video below). He passionately referred to the oceans as one of our most vital natural resources. And of course, as Withdrawn reminds us, the oceans have vast cultural and spiritual value. It also reminds us that those oceans and those resources are at profound risk.

I’ve spent over 25 years studying our planet and its oceans. However, my first ocean research expedition did not occur until 1999, and it was a profoundly eye-opening experience. We were exploring the deep sea communities fuelled by methane extruded from the Mediterranean seafloor.  Isolated from light, the ocean floor is a largely barren world, but in parts of the Mediterranean it is interrupted by explosions of colourful life, including tubeworms, bacterial colonies, fields of molluscs and strange and lonely fish, all thriving in exotic mountains of carbonate crusts cut by saline rivers. These are vibrant ecosystems but so far removed from the surface world and light that they instead depend on chemical energy sourced from deep below the bottom of the ocean. And even here we found human detritus, plastic and cans and bottles.

Those were powerful observations, in large part because of their symbolism: our influence on the oceans is pervasive and quite often in ways that are challenging to fully comprehend and often invisible to the eye. These include, for example:

  • The potentially devastating impact of plastic on marine ecosystems, including plastic nanoparticles that are now, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous.  Of course, pollutants are not limited to plastic – our lab now identifies petroleum-derived hydrocarbons in nearly every ocean sediment we analyse.
  • The decreasing pH of the oceans, due to rising CO2 levels, an acid when dissolved in water. We acidifying the oceans, apparently at a rate faster than at any other time in Earth history, a deeply alarming observation. We are already seeing some consequences of ocean acidification on organisms that make calcium carbonate shells. However, what concerns most scientists is how little we know about the impacts of rapid ocean acidification on marine ecosystems.
  • Ocean warming. A vast amount of the energy that has been trapped in the Earth system by higher greenhouse gas concentrations has been absorbed by the oceans.  Its impact on marine life is only beginning to be documented, but it has been invoked, for example, as an explanation for declines in North Sea fisheries.

And these represent only a few of the chemical and environmental changes we are making to the marine realm. They do not even begin to address the numerous issues associated with our over-exploitation and poor management of our marine resources.

Compounded, these factors pose great risk to the oceans but also to all of us dependent on them. As Cabot Institute Director, I engage with an inspiringly diverse range of environmental scientists, social scientist, engineers, doctors and vets.   And in those conversations, of all the human needs at threat due to environmental change, it is water and food that concern me the most.  And of these, our food provision seems the most wildly unpredictable. The synergistic impact of warmer temperatures, more acidic waters, and more silt-choked coastal waters on a single shellfish species, let alone complex ecosystems such as coral reefs or North Sea food webs, is very difficult to predict. This uncertainty becomes even more pronounced if we factor in nutrient runoff from poorly managed land, eutrophication and ocean anoxia leading to more widespread ‘dead zones’. Or the impact of plastic, hydrocarbon, and anti-biofouling pollutants. The ghost ships of Withdrawn quietly tell the story of how our increased demand and poor management have led to overexploitation of fish stocks, causing an industry to face increasing uncertainty. But they also invoke deeper anxieties about how environmental change and pollution of our seas could devastate our food supply.

But Withdrawn, like other Bristol Green Capital Arts projects and like all inspiring art, does not telegraph a simple message.  It does not shout to ‘bring back local fisherman’ or ‘save our oceans’.  These messages are present but subtly so, and for that both Luke and the National Trust should be celebrated. The boats themselves are captivating and draw you into the fisherman’s efforts; they acknowledge our dependence on the ocean and that we must continue to exploit it. To others they are suggestive of some past catastrophe, a tsunami that has somehow deposited fishing boats in a wildly unanticipated place. And yet to others, they suggest the changing character of seas, seas that once stood 100 m higher than they do today and which almost certainly will do so again if all of our coal and oil is burned into carbon dioxide.

Withdrawn is about all of those things. And consequently, at its deepest level, I think Withdrawn is about change.

Ammonite by Alex Lucas as part of Cabot Institute’s Uncertain World art project.

Geologists have a rather philosophical engagement with the concept of change – on long enough timescales, change is not the exception but the defining character of our planet and life. I should clarify that the aforementioned Mediterranean expedition was my first proper research excursion to the modern seas, but it came long after numerous visits to ancient ones.  In 1993, my PhD co-supervisor Mike Arthur took a group of us to Colorado where we collected samples from sedimentary rocks that had been deposited in the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway 90 million year ago, a Seaway from a hotter, ice-free world, in which higher oceans had invaded a downflexed central North American basin. That might not seem like a proper marine experience but to a geologist you can reconstruct an ocean in startling clarity from the bold clues preserved in the rock: current flows that tell you the shape of the coastline; fossils that reveal the ecosystem, from cyanobacterial mats on the seafloor to inoceramids  and ammonites  to great marine reptiles in the waters above; and the rocks themselves that reveal a shallow sea in which limestone was deposited across a great platform.

But it was only like this at some times.  The fascinating aspect of these rocks is the complex pattern of sedimentation – from limestones to shales and back again – limestones that were much like the lime cliffs of Lyme Regis, switching in a geological blink of the eye to oil shales similar to those in Kimmeridge Bay, from which, further North and at greater depths and pressures, North Sea oils derive. Limestone. Shale. Limestone. Shale. A pattern repeated hundreds of times.  In the Western Interior Seaway.  Along the Jurassic Coast. Across the globe, from the Tarfaya, Vocontian and Maracaibo basins to the Hatteras Abyss, from Cape Verde to the Levant Platform. Cycles and cycles of astonishingly different rock types – all bundled up in patterns suggesting they were modulated by the ever changing character of Earth’s orbit.  These cycles are change, from a sea with clear waters, little algal growth and ringed with reefs to one fed with nutrients and gorged with algal blooms and stripped of oxygen.

Change is a necessary and inevitable feature of our planet.  And of the human condition.

But we seem incapable of resisting the urge to impose a value judgment for or against change. It is either viewed as a technocratic marvel to be celebrated or a violation against the natural state of the world and to be resisted.  But often, change is conflated with loss.  And there is something of loss in Withdrawn. These are the ‘Ghost Ships’ of Leigh Woods.  Ghosts of a way of life that no longer exists. Ghosts of the animals these boats once hunted.  Ghosts of some past and inexplicable event.

Of course, change will always be about progress vs loss, its value neither solely good nor bad but nonetheless inevitable.  But just because a geologist recognises the inevitability of change does not mean he thinks we should be passive to it. Change will come but should be managed, a significant challenge given its rapid pace over the past 150 years. In fact, one of the main observations of Dani Schmidt’s research is that our current rate of environmental change appears to be essentially unprecedented in Earth history, let alone human experience.

My hope is that Withdrawn has caused people to engage with the concept of change. How do we manage change in the 21st century?  How do we recognise those things that can and should be let go. As one visitor said, ‘We want to resist romanticising the past.’  Conversely, how do we decide what change must be moderated, because its cost is too high?  We can reduce our plastic consumption and waste, and we can enforce more rigorous regulations to stop the pollution of our planet – and we should.  More complicated questions arise from how we manage our dependencies on these precious marine resources, but it is clear that we can eat fish more sustainably, and chefs like Josh Eggleton are showing the way. We can create marine reserves that will not only conserve species but serve as biodiversity hotspots benefitting all of the oceans.

Perhaps most importantly, how do we recognise those things that must be preserved?  When I see the ghost ships of Withdrawn, I feel the poignant loss of our connection with nature and our connection with what it provides. Our food is now produced far away, delivered to sterile supermarkets via ships, trains and lorries; maybe that is necessary on a planet of over 7 billion people but if so, we must strive to preserve our connection to the sea – to our whole planet – understanding what it provides and understanding its limits.

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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost
The final Withdrawn talk at Leigh Woods will be taking place on 23 August 2015 and will feature Cabot Institute scientists, Luke Jerram and chef Josh Eggeleton who will be cooking up a sustainable fish and chip supper for attendees.  This event is sold out.

Deep impact – the plastic on the seafloor; the carbon in the air

We live in a geological age defined by human activity.  We live during a time when the landscape of the earth has been transformed by men, its surface paved and cut, its vegetation manipulated, transported and ultimately replaced. A time when the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the rivers and the oceans has been changed – in some ways that are unique for the past million years and in other ways that are unprecedented in Earth history. In many ways, this time is defined not only by our impact on nature but by the redefinition of what it means to be human.

From a certain distance and perspective, the transformation of our planet can be considered beautiful. At night, the Earth viewed from space is a testament to the ubiquitous presence of the human species: cities across the planet glow with fierce intensity but so do villages in Africa and towns in the Midwest; the spotlights of Argentine fishing boats, drawing anchovies to the surface, illuminate the SW Atlantic Ocean; and the flames of flared gas from fracked oil fields cause otherwise vacant tracts of North Dakota to burn as bright as metropolises.

Environmental debates are a fascinating, sometimes frustrating collision of disparate ideas, derived from different experiences, ideologies and perspectives.  And we learn even from those with whom we disagree.  However, one perspective perpetually bemuses and perplexes me: the idea that it is impossible that man could so transform this vast planet. Of course, we can pollute an estuary, cause the Cuyahoga River to catch fire, turn Victorian London black or foul the air of our contemporary cities.  We can turn the Great Plains into cornfields or into dust bowls, the rainforest into palm oil plantations, swamplands into cities and lowlands into nations.  But these are local.  Can we really be changing our oceans, our atmosphere, our Earth that much?

Such doubts underly the statements of, for example, UKIP Energy Spokesman Roger Helmer:

‘The theory of man-made climate change is unproven and implausible’.

It is a statement characterised by a breathless dismissal of scientific evidence but also an astonishingly naive view of man’s capacity to impact our planet.

There are places on Earth where the direct evidence of human intervention is small. There are places where the dominance of nature is vast and exhilarating and awe-inspiring.  And across the planet, few places are entirely immune from reminders – whether they be earthquakes or volcanoes, tsunamis or hurricanes – that nature is vast and powerful.

But the Earth of the 21st century is a planet shaped by humans.

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A powerful example of humanity’s impact on our planet is our Plastic Ocean.  We generate nearly 300 billion tons of plastic per year, much of it escaping recycling and much of that escaping the landfill and entering our oceans. One of the most striking manifestations of this is the vast trash vortex in the Northern Pacific Gyre. The size of the vortex depends on assumptions of concentration and is somewhat dependent on methodology, but estimates range from 700 thousand square kilometres to more than 15 million square kilometres.  The latter estimate represents nearly 10% of the entire Pacific Ocean.   Much of the plastic in the trash vortex – and throughout our oceans – occurs as fine particles invisible to the eye.  But they are there and they are apparently ubiquitous, with concentrations in the trash vortex reaching 5.1 kg per square km*.  That’s equivalent to about 200 1L bottles.  Dissolved.  Invisible to the eye.  But present and dictating the chemistry of the ocean.

More recently, colleagues at Plymouth, Southampton and elsewhere illustrated the widespread occurrence of rubbish, mainly plastic, on the ocean floor.  Their findings did not surprise deep sea biologists nor geologists; we have been observing our litter in these supposedly pristine settings since some of the first trips to the abyss.

My first submersible dive was on the Nautile, a French vessel that was part of a joint Dutch-French expedition to mud volcanoes and associated methane seeps in the Mediterranean Sea.  An unfortunate combination of working practice, choppy autumn seas and sulfidic sediments had made me seasick for most of the research expedition, such that my chance to dive to the seafloor was particularly therapeutic. The calm of the deep sea, as soon as we dipped below the wave base, was a moment of profound physical and emotional peace.  As we sank into the depths, the light faded and all that remained was the very rare fish and marine snow – the gently sinking detritus of life produced in the light-bathed surface ocean.

As you descend, you enter a realm few humans had seen…. For a given dive, for a given locale, it is likely that no human has preceded you.

Mud volcanoes form for a variety of reasons, but in the Mediterranean region they are associated with the tectonic interactions of the European and African continents.  This leads to the pressurised extrusion of slurry from several km below the bottom of the sea, along mud diapirs and onto the seafloor. They are commonly associated with methane seeps; in fact a focus of our expedition was to examine the microbes and wider deep sea communities that thrive when this methane is exposed to oxidants at the seafloor – a topic for another essay. In parts of the Mediterranean Sea, they are associated with salty brines, partially derived from the great salt deposits that formed in a partly evaporated ocean about five and a half million years ago.

And all of these factors together create an undersea landscape of indescribable beauty.
On these mud volcanoes are small patches, about 20 cm wide, where methane escapes to the seafloor.  There, methane bubbles from the mud or is capped by thick black, rubbery mats of microorganisms.  Ringing these mats are fields of molluscs, bouquets of tube worms, great concrete slabs of calcium carbonate or white rims of sulphide and the bacteria thriving on it. Streaming from these seeps, down the contours of the mud cones, are ribbons of ultra-dense, hypersaline water.  The rivulets merge into streams and then into great deep sea rivers. Like a photonegative of low-density oil slicking upon the water’s surface, these are white, high-density brines flowing along the seafloor.  Across the Mediterranean Sea, they pool into beautiful ponds and in a few very special cases, form great brine lakes.

And two kilometres below the seafloor, where humans have yet to venture our rubbish has already established colonies. Plastic bottles float at the surface of these lakes; aluminium cans lie in the mud amongst the microbial mats; between those thick slabs of calcium carbonate sprout colonies of tube worms and the occasional plastic bag.

Image from Nautile Dive to the Mediterranean seafloor.  Shown are carbonate crusts that form where methane has escaped to the seafloor as well as tube worms thriving on the chemical energy available in such settings.  Plastic debris has been circled in the upper right corner.

We have produced as much plastic in the past decade as we have in the entirety of the preceding human history.  But the human impact is not new.  On our very first dive, we observed a magnificent amphora, presumably of ancient Greek or Roman origin and nearly a metre across, half buried in the mud.

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Today the human footprint is ubiquitous. Nearly 40% of the world’s land is used for agriculture – and over 70% of the land in the UK.  Another 3% of the land is urbanised.  A quarter of arable land has already been degraded.

There are outstanding contradictions and non-intuitive patterns that emerge from a deeper understanding of this modified planet.  Pollinators are more diverse in England’s cities than they are in our rural countryside.  One of the most haunting nature preserves on our planet is the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea – fraught with landmines but free from humans, wildlife now dominates. And of course, although global warming will cause vast challenges over the coming centuries, that is largely due to one human impact (greenhouse gas emissions) intersecting with another (our cities in vulnerable, low-lying areas and our borders and poverty preventing migration from harm).   And on longer timescales, we have likely spared our descendants of 10,000 years from now the hassle of dealing with another Ice Age.

Glyptodon, source Wikipedia

But there can be no doubt or misunderstanding –  we have markedly changed the chemical composition of our atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been for the past 800,000 years, perhaps the last 3 million years.  It is likely that the last time the Earth’s atmosphere contained this much carbon dioxide, glyptodons, armadillo-like creatures the size of cars, roamed the American West, and hominids were only beginning the first nervous evolutionary steps towards what would eventually become man. Methane concentrations are three times higher than they were before the agricultural and industrial revolutions.  Also higher are the concentrations of nitrous oxides.  And certain chlorofluorcarbons did not even exist on this planet until we made them.

The manner in which we have changed our planet has – at least until now – allowed us to thrive, created prosperity and transformed lives in ways that would have astonished those from only a few generations in the past.  It is too soon to say whether our collective impact has been or will be, on the whole, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for either the planet or those of us who live upon it. It will perhaps never be possible to define such a complex range of impacts in simple black and white terms.  But there is no doubt that our impact has been vast, ubiquitous and pervasive.  And it is dangerous to underestimate even momentarily our tremendous capacity to change our planet at even greater rates and in even more profound ways in the future.

*Moore, C.J; Moore, S.L; Leecaster, M.K;
Weisberg, S.B (2001). “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North
Pacific Central Gyre”. Marine
Pollution Bulletin
 42 (12): 1297–300. 
doi:10.1016/S0025-326X(01)00114-X. PMID 11827116.


This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute.

Prof Rich Pancost