Sea of Troubles

I have been seeing a lot of news about the oceans in the news. This article mentions marine organisms cropping up in strange places, and this one suggests that military sonar might be to blame. I think the problem is much bigger than sonar experiments gone bad. To me, it seems that some arctic animals may be looking for their habitat. "Hey, this isn't right. I can't be in the arctic." Then they go looking for where the arctic may have gone, and end up in mid-latitude waters. Who moved my cheese? Likewise with the tropical organisms, who may also find something wrong with their waters and go looking for their missing habitat.

The Los Angeles Times had a five-part series on the oceans called "Altered Oceans". Part 5 was about the increasing acidification of the oceans as the take up CO₂ from the atmosphere. Part 4 was about the growing amounts of plastic found in the oceans. The Great Garbage Patch, formerly known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, is a mass of floating plastic objects accumulated since WWII. According to a story in the Seattle Times,

In August 1998, Moore and his crew extensively sampled the surface waters of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre with a fine-mesh net resembling a manta ray. "What we saw amazed us," Moore said in an analysis for the 2001 Marine Pollution Bulletin. "We were looking at a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments — a plastic-plankton soup." The team collected six times more plastic particles (by weight) than zooplankton.

That is worrying. It would seem that the slow decomposition of plastics would increase the CO₂ in the water or in the atmosphere, too. Does the increasing acidification of the oceans help dissolve the plastics? Will any animals or plants evolve a way to use the plastic? Is it really impossible to "clean" the oceans? At a certain concentration, might it not be cost-effective, at some future time, to develop a process to filter out the plastic particles and use them for something else? Certainly, if some beaches are themselves now composed of plastic sand, it could almost be scooped up and used again to create windmills or something, or could just be burned as fuel. Could floating colonies of sea-gypsies live on the Great Garbage Patch, creating floating islands of polystyrene and the like, lashed together with old fishing nets and barnacle-derived glues, powered by wind, waves, and solar? Their nets gather tiny plastic particles, their giant parabolic mirrors distill water and melt down the plastic mash to produce nets of plastic baubles to extend the growing island.