As the search for Malaysian Air flight 370 churns ever onward into the Indian Ocean and countless floating fragments thought to be evidence turn out to be just so much trash, it got us to thinking about what the conditions must really be like way out there in the middle of the great blue nowhere.

We've all heard about the Pacific Trash Heap, the spot where global currents are conspiring to create a bait ball of man made refuse for sea creatures to asphyxiate themselves with. Many of us associate it with that famous photo of a man canoeing through a wasteland of garbage, though it turns out this was a hoax – he's actually in an Asian harbor. So what's the deal? Is all this talk about dirty oceans just some Earth First anti-industrialism propaganda, or should we be packing the bomb shelter with all the food and fresh water we can before the seas turn to toxic swamps? To get some perspective, we asked an expert, Dr. Chelsea Rochman, who is a marine ecologist and ecotoxicologist at U.C. Davis' Aquatic Health Program.

NOAA

I've been through the North Pacific Gyre and the South Atlantic. It doesn't surprise me that they're looking for debris from an airplane and they're coming across marine debris. You see big pieces of debris float by randomly.

A lot of the big stuff is natural disaster debris –you know, from tsunamis and stuff. When something big happens like that you get a lot of large pieces going into the oceans and floating around almost indefinitely, until it washes up on a beach somewhere.

The oceans are basically one giant toilet bowl for all of our waste that's not managed properly. And even some that is managed properly – we still let it go out into watersheds and move into the ocean.

On a calm day you can look off the bow of your ship and see little tiny flecks of what looks like confetti plastic debris everywhere.

What I specifically study is how the debris affects wildlife. The plastics in the ocean are like a sponge for the other pollutants that are out there. Pesticides and flame-retardants and other industrial pollutants that end up in the ocean, they're attracted to solid things. And then the plastic itself harbors chemicals that are associated with it that can be hazardous to animals.

If a fish eats a piece of plastic, the plastic may go right through them and come out the other end. But it its loaded with this cocktail of contaminants that are potentially toxic, so what I look at is how those chemicals move from the plastic into the food chain, and how it effects the animals. Does it cause tumors? Does it cause them to change behavior and not be able to escape a predator? Does it cause death?

In the scientific literature, it's known that there are chemicals and contaminants in seafood, and that those chemicals transfer to humans. You hear people talking about mercury poisoning from sushi, and "don't eat certain seafood items if you're pregnant," etc. So that phenomenon of chemicals getting into our food chain is not new, and plastic we now know is another vector for these contaminants to get into fish.

I've found in my research that chemicals from plastic will transfer to fish when they eat it, and it does cause toxic effects.

We were looking specifically at the liver, because the liver is your detoxifying organ. If the liver is challenged, then it's hard to take care of a lot of other stress in your body. And we did find that the liver was working on overdrive, and it was having fatty deposits, which is a beginning of liver degeneration.

If you look at cirrhosis of the liver with people who've had too much alcohol, you find the same thing, fatty liver deposits. We did find a tumor in one of the fish in the liver. So from our research, we found that it can transfer into the food chain and it does cause harm.

Nobody owns the ocean 200 miles outside of any piece of land. Yet garbage is managed locally. Incredibly locally, like city-by-city. I mean, yes, there's a law out there that says you can't dump, but nobody is really regulating that.

I think the key is waste management strategies.

It's one of those problems that is unique. Because it's tangible to people, and the solution is local. It's really one of those things where everyone can make a difference, because it is really all of our problem, and we are all adding to it.

It's not all under water. You do see it. It's not an island the way that the media has described it, so it's not like you go out there and you suddenly float into this dump. It's more like this diluted soup. You see big pieces of things like they're finding in the search for the plane floating around, like a big door goes by, or a cup tray from a boat.

It's heartbreaking. and when you think of all the little stuff, being diluted like that. You really think, "how could you clean that up?" If there was an island of trash I could go out with a big scoop and shovel it out, but its very diluted and very widespread.

On a rough day you can't necessarily see it floating on the surface because it's being churned up, and then you drag your net, and at the end of your net is a bunch of the little confetti flecks, almost in every single net full. It's not one out of every ten.

I do think it's good for everyone to do their part with their Klean Kanteens or plasticbags, because these single use items are pointless, especially in our country.

Every little thing makes a difference, if only because you don't want to tell people every little thing won't make a difference. Green trends are great, but if you look at it globally, there's an awful lot of countries out there with no waste management strategy at all. There are island communities that throw everything straight into the ocean.

It's waste management. I think it's governments changing laws so that we actually adopt waste management strategies. I mean, yeah.

How bad are our coasts? Learn more at theNOAA Marine Debris site.

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