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Brazilian researchers find plastic rocks on remote island
- domatic1 4y agoIt’s just melted plastic from fishing nets and other debris
- isoprophlex 4y agoDoesn't matter if it was made of fishing nets, bits of molten dragon dildo, or other debris, our plastic shit doesn't belong there.
- rrwo 4y agoYes, it means that the plastic is going to start entering the good chain there. Plastiglomerate rocks mean that there are bits of plastic in the soil, and this will be consumed by plants and worms, which will be consumed by animals that eat them.
- 11235813213455 4y agonote that toxic things tend to accumulate more higher in the chain (animals) than lower (plants/trees)
- soco 4y agoWe are already quite touched by microplastics, checks show them everywhere in humans and their foods. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/microplastics-are-in-our-bodies-how-much-do-they-harm-us https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...
- SammyNameTaken 4y agothis is not a good thing, if current plastics get eaten it will lead to more waste
- domatic1 4y agoProbably nothing we've built should belong in nature but probably we are part of nature too.
- vc9999 4y agoReally? I thought nature was manufacturing plastic rocks
- petodo 4y agoJust another form of oil made by nature.
- mecklyuii 4y ago'just' srsly? Who cares if we live on a non diverse plastic rock... I thought a lot would care but often enough I get corrected even on hn
- squeegee_scream 4y agoWe are so fucked
- CalRobert 4y agoSadly it seems we're taking down a lot of other creatures with us.
- paulcole 4y agoThis shouldn’t be surprising. We as a society really like plastic stuff and really like pretending our actions as individuals don’t have consequences. It’s like the hotdog meme guy. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/were-all-trying-to-find-the-guy-who-did-this https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/were-all-trying-to-find-the-g...
- fredley 4y agoIndividual action alone cannot stem climate change and mass plastic pollution. All the cheapest food is packaged in single-use plastic. All the cheapest clothes and toys are made of plastic. One simply cannot opt out of this system without making massive, potentially ostrasizing changes to one's life. Many/most cannot afford fancy plastic-free goods. Most plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to shipping and in particular fishing[0]. Nothing I can do individually can address this, change must come from World leaders and industry bodies working in good faith across international borders. They all know this is happening, they all know measures that could be taken to address it. Much of the framing of climate change and pollution as individual responsibility comes from large industry bodies themselves, who would much rather you feel guilty about it personally rather than wonder if they might be to blame.[1] [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f... [1]: Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
- paulcole 4y ago> Individual action alone cannot stem climate change and mass plastic pollution Yes, but lack of individual action also cannot stem climate change and mass plastic pollution. > Most plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to shipping and in particular fishing[0]. Nothing I can do individually can address this You can stop eating fish and you can limit the amount of junk you buy! But if you like eating fish and you like buying junk and you don’t want to inconvenience yourself, you’ll say that it’s the world leaders and industry bodies who must change. And don’t get me wrong, this is an absolutely fine stance to have. You and I will be dead before the consequences of our choices are felt. But don’t pretend like there’s nothing you can do. It’s just that there’s nothing you actually want to do.
- bell-cot 4y agoZzz... If a modern chemical plant is sloppy with $Stable_Chemical, then it's no surprise to find that chemical in the ground under it, in the groundwater, etc. The bottom of the Mediterranean is littered with thousands-of-years-old pottery fragments from ancient shipwrecks and such. Coal mining is a thing, all over the world, because microorganisms mostly couldn't break down dead trees back during the Carboniferous Era - ~300 million years ago. The sedimentary process how the Earth deals with ~anything that water doesn't dissolve, and microorganisms & such can't break down. That has not been news since 4 or so billion years ago.
- user3939382 4y agoWe’re not having our blood poisoned from the remnants of clay pots and trees.
- aperson_hello 4y agoWe kind of are from coal...
- gonzo41 4y agoWell the air's generally cleaner now than earlier times in the industrial revolution. If you think about pm2 and not co2 conc. Just look at the photo's of london when people burn coal for residential heating.
- themitigating 4y agoThanks to environmentalists who have to fight tooth and nail against other people who put human progress above all else
- bell-cot 4y agoThe annual ups and downs of Ancient Rome's economy can be tracked via lead in ice cores drawn from glaciers in Greenland. ( https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/greenland-ice-cores-track-roman-lead-pollution-in-year-by-year-detail/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/greenland-ice-cores-... )
- tambourine_man 4y agoWe don't call it the Anthropocene for nothing.
- 5040 4y agoGood or bad, this is kind of cool. The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record.
- is_true 4y agoI sometimes help an organizations that monitors the health of a river, a couple of years ago they started buying plastic buoys because the ones made from metal were a bit more expensive.
- etrautmann 4y agoDoes that seem like a major environmental issue to you? Are they leaving those buoys as trash there? I’m not sure I understand the concern.
- justinclift 4y agoSounds like they're pointing out the double standard.
- etrautmann 4y agosure but it'd be penny-wise, pound foolish to hamper environmental research by eliminating the use of plastic components in research equipment. A few pieces of research equipment that are nominally retrieved are not going to be a major source of contamination no matter how you slice it. Dealing with environmental release of plastics is a major concern, but absolutism in this weird and focused domain accomplishes nothing useful and serves as a distraction from real solutions.
- csomar 4y agoThey’ll eventually end up as trash even if the team properly get rid of them. That and they can produce some micro plastic pollution too even if they are being recycled.
- carlosjobim 4y agoWhy would they end up as trash? Buoys are desirable, somebody would take them.
- 4y ago
- Qem 4y agoI think this counts against the Silurian Hypothesis. If a previous technical civilization existed on earth millions of years ago, by now we would have already found its plastic rocks. Those appears ours. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
- elevaet 4y agoI think the silurian hypothesis still holds. It's unlikely that these plastic rocks would remain in their current form for the next x million years.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoOn a long enough timescale, any trace of a precursor civilization would be taken into the earth's crust through tectonic shifts; still curious to think about though. Closer to today would be Atlantis, if it was an island then it might still be somewhere under the sea / sediment.
- Turing_Machine 4y agoWell, maybe. To name one example, the Canadian Shield, though heavily eroded, has never been subducted. You can still find exposed Precambian rock there. To name another, the Burgess Shale (also in Canada) contains fossils of some of the earliest known complex organisms.
- psychoslave 4y agoOr they never used oil. Or better managed their use, with no waste of the form. Not to say I believe a iota in such an hypothesis though.
- jibe 4y agoDoes this article deserve some skepticism? Will fishing nets really melt like that? It looks like they took some oven waste and put it in the oven. If plastics were melting like this in nature, wouldn’t we have seen a lot of it, all over the warm parts of the planet, by now?
- iLoveOncall 4y agoI think you missed the part where the island is an active volcano.
- elzbardico 4y agoLast vulcanic activity on the islands was 50.000 years ago.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 4y agoI agree on the skepticism. The article says that these fishing nets just melted on the beach from high temperature, but there is no beach on earth that I've heard of where temperatures are hot enough to melt plastic. 56°C is the world record temperature, not hot enough. The origin of these melted plastic blobs are what's interesting. People here treat the discovery as some kind of warning against pollution, but it's an oddity: something that has been found in only one place.
- Strom 4y ago> 56°C is the world record temperature, not hot enough. That sounds like air temperature. Surface temperature gets way hotter. It’s well known you can cook an egg on desert sand.
- carlosjobim 4y agoBut how could it get hot enough to melt plastic in this beach, but nowhere else in the world?
- surgical_fire 4y agoThere's some beauty on it. Nature incorporates our garbage, and it becomes part of nature. It might kill us, but then new creatures will evolve and grow, with plastic being part of their ecosystem, perhaps even desirable. In million years the future civilization of these creatures might have "plastic preservation programs" because the old plastic rocks are a finite resource upon witch their culture was built. They might even gaze upon their plastic-filled oceans in awe, with some quasi-religious gratitude for the ancient race that gracefully filled the world with plastic that they might thrive.
- caseyw 4y agoWow, now I want to gather bottles and throw them in the ocean. I kid of course, but that’s sorta beautiful. I always knew someone would see me as a god despite what my wife says.
- datavirtue 4y agoNow, if I could just get her to call me Lord.
- 8note 4y agoEveryone gets quite excited about collecting sea glass, depending about what kinds of bottles you're going to drop
- themitigating 4y ago"might kill us, but then new creatures will evolve and grow, with plastic being part of their ecosystem, perhaps even desirable." Is that possible? As far as I know nothing consumes rocks and they've been around forever.
- jaggirs 4y agoUnlike rocks, plastic is high in energy (as evidenced by the fact that you can put it on fire).
- elevaet 4y agoThis is one of the better outcomes for plastics floating around in the oceans that I can think of. Melted and lumped into rocks it won't tangle living organisms, and it should be more inert than if it were ground into micro-particles due to far less surface area. It's even more beautiful than tangled nets and other plastic debris. I'm not trying to defend it mind you, we really really need to do a better job of keeping plastic out of the oceans.
- blackshaw 4y ago> we really really need to do a better job of keeping plastic out of the oceans This was really hammered home to me on a trip I took a couple of months ago. I was on an uninhabited island and, while the island as a whole was beautiful, the beaches were all COVERED in plastic debris from the high-tide line upwards. It was really quite shocking to see. I knew that there's a lot of plastic floating in the oceans, but I hadn't considered how much of it gets washed ashore. It doesn't accumulate if there's someone around to clean it up, but in uninhabited areas it's devastating. I wouldn't have believed how bad things are if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I wrote about the whole trip here, scroll down about halfway for a photo of what I'm talking about: https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/desert-island https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/desert-island
- bsaul 4y agosame here. I was so shocked at how beautiful thailand island beaches were ruined that for the first time in my life i considered joining an ngo...
- soderfoo 4y agoThe largest contributors for plastic inputs to oceans are commercial fishing and a few rivers in Asia.[1] I often feel powerless when a call to action is cloaked with the phrase "we must do ${something}" Some data at least gives me a concrete talking point if I ever talk to my local congress /parliament representative. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
- 4y ago
- c1p0 4y agoWow, I guess George Carlin was right about this one too.
- Pigalowda 4y agoI think so. Maybe Tardigrades will find some use for it..
- nylon_panda 4y agothe effect of having plastic merged with rocks is unknown, its bewildering to see comments romanticizing it, akin to those staring in awe of the green sky during chernobyl
- WUMBOWUMBO 4y agotook the words right from my brain
- hinkley 4y agoI have to bite my tongue every time people wonder at the brilliant red sunsets. That's pollution, friends.
- CTmystery 4y agoI guess I shouldn't be surprised by the "this is fine" comments here, but I am. Geological changes happen in geological time (outside of massive disruptive events). This change happened in 100 years. Also, comparing this to clay pots is simply not understanding the scale of modern production and waste. It's like saying a forest fire doesn't pose any problem to my house because I lit a match one time.
- kypro 4y agoI guess I neither feel that "this is fine" or "this is terrifying". The truth is we ultimately don't know what the consequences will be. To your analogy, this really could be more of a match than a forest fire. We just don't know. I'm not trying to be dismissive though... It's concerning for sure, but I don't think we know enough to be terrified. Although, I'm happy to be corrected.
- zug_zug 4y agoI almost get that, but the more I think about it the more unreasonable it sounds. If I put 1 bullet in a revolver and spun the chamber, would I feel afraid to pull the trigger with the gun to my head? I wouldn't really know that I was in danger, just that there was a chance... Yet I would be afraid, and really should be. Maybe the difference is that other people wouldn't put the risk of ruin at 1/6. Or perhaps it's just the "black swan effect" (the human tendency to treat improbable events as impossible).
- xboxnolifes 4y agoBut it's not so sudden. Say we have the same revolver with a single bullet. But this bullet doesn't kill. If you pull the trigger and the bullet fires, everyone's life may or may not be negatively impacted by an unknown degree sometime in the coming decades. I may feel hesitation, but I would not feel fear. It's not because it's a rare event, it's because it's a slow, "invisible", and uncertain event.
- hinkley 4y ago"The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
- code51 4y agoAside from fire hazard probability, are there any studies done about whether plastics fused with rocks (cement) could be a good material for building houses that are resistant to earthquakes? (Not discarding the use of steel)
- hollander 4y agoIf concrete mixed with plastics is a good idea, then it should be done in a controlled environment (factory), not taken from the sea. I don't see what this has to do with earthquake resistant building. If you want some "flex" in building materials, we already have steel. If plastic can replace steel, or can replace it partly, that would be great. Mixing plastic with concrete is environmentally a bad idea in the long run. How are you going to undo that mix later?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThere's quite a few instances where they take plastic and incorporate it into bricks, cement or ground cover, e.g. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-trash-kenyan-inventor-plastic-bricks.html https://phys.org/news/2022-03-trash-kenyan-inventor-plastic-...; if you don't mind videos, Business Insider has a decent series on subjects like this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmur3Z0Afau7p-Au2E1uYKYVPNE2b62dN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmur3Z0Afau7p-Au2E1uY...
- rvieira 4y agoNot saying this is good news, but given the current amount of plastic floating around in the oceans, isn't aggregating as a big chunk better for the environment[1] than disintegrating into micro-plastics or small debris? [1] excluding the "no plastics in the ocean" choice, of course
- hollander 4y agoAggregating in one big chunk can be good news, if it is treated as a garbage collector and if the garbage is removed. If the plastic isn't removed, then it will be an eternal source of microplastics. I can't see how that is a good thing, unless some fish, bacteria or plant knows how to eat that plastic and make it into something harmless. I doubt that this will act like a plastic-magnet for the microplastics in the area.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RickHull 4y agoTerrifying, really? Terraforming, maybe, but it seems a little hysterical to react with terror to this phenomenon.
- xkcd1963 4y agoIf this plastic didn't decompose due to salty water and sunrays into smaller parts, isn't that actually convenient for us, since it is unlikely to get out of the rocks and cause harm?