Author Archives: McCoy

Supersized Garbage Collection

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Patching the Patch

The Deep Blue Sea

Last time around, I took on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's a floating collection of garbage, about the size of the state of Texas and largely composed of floating bits of plastic. The patch is an alarming thing, and I’ve placed it solidly in my “Cautionary Tales” category, which now has 35 entries since I began blogging.

Lest you think I’m all about doom-and-gloom scenarios, I also discover rays of hope in my reading and research. This is one of them:

A young inventor thinks that he's found a solution to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Boyan Slat, born in 1994, (yes, I did say he was young), spent much of his youth near and in the ocean. Time and again, he encountered plastic in the waters. Eventually, he grew really bothered by how pessimistic people were about developing solutions to ocean plastics. And so, in a fine example of youthful idealism balanced by realism, he decided to do something about it himself.

Boyan’s project, The Ocean Cleanup, is developing a large-scale, passive method of removing floating plastic. Essentially, his invention is a large, floating U-shaped pipe that will gather the plastic bits as it drifts.

To ensure that the device collects enough, it will employ a sea anchor—hanging down in the water, increasing drag via an extremely un-hydrodynamic shape— to slow down, so that the plastic flows faster through the gyre than the pipe. This is designed to ensure the plastic runs into—and not under—the capturing pipe.

Naturally, the project has its critics. Most of the plastic in the ocean is made up of particles too small for the system to gather. Quite a bit of plastic ends up on the seafloor, as well. Both of these criticisms, and quite a few of the others, tend to focus on the idea that this project doesn't do enough or is inefficient.

Those are legitimate criticisms, but they also ignore the fact that at least Boyan Slat and his project are doing something. Something is a lot better than nothing. And nothing is about exactly what we've been doing so far to solve this problem.

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Quotable

Yard Ramp Guy: Quotations are plentiful. Just look:

“Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.”

— Ken Burns

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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Or: Tainted Tuna Tartare

garbage patch

Trash Flow

There's a floating patch of garbage, larger than Texas, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific Ocean contains huge, slow moving gyre-shaped currents. Debris that drifts into the calm centers of those gyres tend to stay there. It’s similar in some ways to the nearly self-contained gyre that’s the Sargasso Sea but caused by different things.

The debris that drifts into the biggest one, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone? Bits of plastic.

When you sail into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you won't see a lot of chunks of garbage floating around, and you certainly can't walk on it. Instead, the plastic has broken down into tiny particles that float in the upper layers of the water. Fish frequently mistake it for food and often starve, with stomachs full of plastic.

Many other lifeforms find the plastic poisonous, and as the plastics break down, they leak toxic chemicals into the environment, including ones as nasty as PCBs. (Don't read about PCBs unless you really want to freak yourself out, but if you must, click HERE).

There are even bacteria that have learned to eat the plastics, but they end up producing even nastier toxins much of the time.

As the toxic chemicals and plastics are ingested by fish, jellyfish, and other marine animals, they grow increasingly concentrated, up the food chain, as predators eat toxin-laden critters. Many of those predators in turn, like tuna (which are shockingly high up the food chain) contain much higher levels of toxins than the water around them. And then we, the people in this story, eat them. Bon appétit.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't alone. There is another major gyre in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean. They all contain garbage patches of their own. What are we doing to clean up these patches? Not much yet, other than research, really. There are lots of plans in the air, but not that much funding.

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Quotable

Okay, Yard Ramp Guy: Our duel calls for Kalm. May Kooler heads prevail.

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”

— Dave Barry

Parrotfish Prognosis

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A Cautionary, er, Tail

Source of Your Sand Castle

Caribbean beaches are beautiful, even by the standards of tropical beaches, which are pretty high to start with. They're also made largely of poop. Parrotfish poop, to be specific.

(Okay, full disclosure: I’m not currently on a beach. I write this on a Sunday morning, in my robe, from my man cave next to the house here in suburbia. I’m safe. And thanks for caring.)

Move past the thought of that, and it’s a fascinating process:

The brilliantly colored parrotfish possesses a hard beak it employs for eating coral. The fish grinds up the coral in that beak to get at algae and other marine microorganisms growing on it, digests the algae, and then poops out the ground-up coral as a fine sand.

Parrotfish produce a LOT of sand, too. A single green humphead parrotfish can produce more than 200 pounds of sand each year. As much as 85% of the sand on many of these beaches is produced by parrotfish.

Watch it in action HERE, if you dare.

People used to think that parrotfish just ate coral for the polyps and were damaging the reefs. It turns out, though, that most parrotfish species go primarily for dead coral, clearing it for new coral to grow. So, they’re providing a sort of public service.

Parrotfish also eat large amounts of sea sponges, which grow faster than coral and can smother young ones. As it turns out, our parrotfish have a largely symbiotic relationship with the corals they eat. And as we learn more and more about the world, we begin to find more and more of these relationships. 

It's not just the Caribbean that owes its beaches to parrotfish. The Maldives, the white sand beaches of Hawaii, and other locations around the world do, as well.

Gorgeous white sand beaches in tropical areas around the world are all made of poop. A little gross, I know. Which is exactly why I'm telling everyone: I’m simply trying to clear out a few of you so that my next beach experience is less crowded.

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Quotable

So, Yard Ramp Guy: Let's duel.

“Lacrosse is fast paced and I like fast paced games. It's demanding physically and has the hardest conditioning of any sport. You are always running if you are not sprinting. It's constant movement.” 

— Aaron Gray

The Monongahela-Duquesne Connection

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Fun with Funiculars

Funicular

It's a Steep Slope, Sherlock

It's been a while since I've written about one of my favorite subjects. And since this started out as a blog all about ramps, it feels about time to ramp up once again.

First, a refresher course on the funicular. It’s a railway on a steep incline—often 45 degrees or more—that contain a pair of cars that are attached with a cable and that counterbalance one another. When one car moves up, the other moves down. I've written about them before (see HERE). I think they're fairly extraordinary.

End of refresher course.

The Monongahela Incline is America's oldest continually operating funicular. Located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it stretches from the flood plain of the Monongahela River up to the top of Mount Washington, a neighborhood with one of the most beautiful views in any city in America. (When the funicular was built in 1870, however, the neighborhood was known as Coal Hill.)

Around 1860, Pittsburgh's expanding industrial base began drawing German immigrants (among others) to the area. Since the industrial districts already filled up most of the flood plain, the new workers began settling on the hillsides nearby.

With few good roads and little public transit, the trek to and from work was up and down the steep and frequently muddy hill. Germany, however, had employed funiculars for some time already, so residents quickly proposed the opening of their own funicular. 

A second funicular reaching the neighborhood, the Duquesne Incline, opened in 1877. Originally a cargo carrier, engineers later converted it for passenger use.

The Duquesne Incline remains open today, except for a one-year closure in the 1960s, when it was saved by a community fundraiser.

Other funiculars have been built, but only the Monongahela and Duquesne Inclines made it out of the 1960s…along with some people I know.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy: I’ve read your comment this week regarding our not meeting at the center of our alphabetical quote-off. According to my calculations (a 1986 Texas Instruments calculator), you and I had a 50 percent chance of landing on the same letter. The problem—and the beauty—here is that we’re both of us consistent. Alas, we’re like two ships that pass in the night. Not to quote Manilow, or anything.

“Management: An activity or art where those who have not yet succeeded and those who have proved unsuccessful are led by those who have not yet failed.”

— Paulson Frenckner

Bretzian Geology

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A Flood of Ideas

J Harlen Bretz, 1949

Geologists have a tendency to get really worked up about flood-related theories. Early in the history of the science, the Biblical flood provided the foundation for most every claim, and we approached all of geology in that context.

Evidence built up over time until it forced the geological community to acknowledge that nothing of the sort had happened. In fact, they went so far as to construct a doctrine called uniformitarianism, which claimed that all past geological processes are the same as the ones operating now.

Then, in 1920, a geologist named J Harlen Bretz developed a new set of flood theory that would shake things up all over again.

Bretz's research and field work led him to propose a series of absolutely catastrophic floods in the Pacific Northwest. I won't go into all the various iterations of the idea over the years, but the floods as we understand them now are far more destructive than almost any other geological events today.

The Cordilleran

During the ice ages, the Cordilleran continental ice sheet dwarfed any glacier existing today. It and its several sibling glaciers around the world held enough ice to lower the sea levels by hundreds of feet. As the temperature gradually increased, however, a massive lake, around the size of one of the Great Lakes, began to melt into the top of the ice sheet, somewhere in Western Montana.

Over time, cracks began to grow in the massive ice dam holding the lake in, until it finally shattered, releasing all the water at once. The floodwaters would have moved between 45 and 60 miles per hour, cresting at over 400 feet tall in the Columbia River Gorge and the Willamette River Valley.

McCoy Fields, 2017

Flood waters carried enormous boulders as though they were twigs, deforming entire landscapes. The debris from the flood flowed hundreds of miles through Idaho and Oregon, and from there well into the Pacific Ocean.

Oh, and there wasn't just a single flood. The ice sheet eventually formed a new lake and the cycle repeated itself as many as forty times. This all took place well before any humans arrived in North America.

The geological establishment resisted Bretz’s ideas for years, but Bretz and his allies eventually won the day in a crushing victory. Decades later, Bretz complained that he no longer had any enemies to gloat over.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy: Now, here’s a quotation:

“Nature gave men two ends -- one to sit on, and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most.”

— Robert Albert Bloch