Post Tagged with: "plastic"

Project Ocean: Larger Than Us

We are part of a greater system – not above, beyond and outside it. If the ocean flounders, so will we. It’s environmental preservation, but self-preservation too. So go outside. Breathe the air. Taste the water. Go on a mini (or a massive) adventure. We cannot protect what we do not love and we cannot love what we do not feel connected to, so that’s my advice and that is what I am taking from Project Ocean 2015.

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Gyre to Gaia II: At sea, thinking about how we live our lives at home

At six people, we’re a rather small crew for this boat, and our four-hour shifts make me feel like a newborn baby — constantly put to bed and soon awoken abruptly, given food and drink, and thrust from my cocoon of a hammock-bed into a precarious waterworld above, strapped to the ship by a safety leash. But the crew is healthy and able, the weather’s been gorgeous, playful-seeming dolphins dance along the boat during the day, and magical-seeming bioluminescence dances along at night, and there’s no sign of human life in any direction.

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Gyre to Gaia II: Settling into the rhythm of life on board

The crew have settled well into the rhythm of life on board, with watchkeeping, rest, trawling, cooking, cleaning, and keeping Sea Dragon running smoothly. We have continued our twice daily trawls off the stern, and our scientist Adam is pleased with the results. He’s collecting enough data to keep him busy in the laboratory at Exeter University over the long winter months.

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Gyre to Gaia II: Of plastic and plankton

The latest estimate of plastics afloat in our seas and oceans is put at 5.25 trillion pieces, weighing in at 250,000 tonnes. That, coupled with the fact that over 260 marine related species are known to be ingesting plastics from our oceans, and well documented evidence on the impacts of this ingestion on a wide variety of marine animals including zooplankton, makes man’s legacy a dirty one. However, it is not too late! We can change things.

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Project Ocean: Exploration to the Gyres

And this is what lies at the heart of Panagea Explorations, taking ordinary people out to sea, to witness and research the growing problem of marine plastic debris. And this is what lies at the heart of Selfridges’ exhibition also. A concept model of Sea Dragon is surrounded by five beautifully designed items, each of which are representations of the five ocean gyres, by artist duo Studio Swine.

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Project Ocean: Loops and Cycles

This post originally appeared on the ONCA blog here. By Laura Coleman, Onca Director There are cycles to this planet.  We learn about them in school.  Rock, carbon, water and nitrogen; they all flow in beautiful circles.  But there’s something else that flows too.  Waste.  More specifically plastic, in the […]

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Project Ocean: A Sea Change

Our oceans are full of plastic, and fragments of fishing nets, bottle lids, microbeads and cotton buds are some of the most dangerous things that lurk in the deep. Yesterday was the first in a series of events this summer run by Selfridges Project Ocean, the Zoological Society London and a host of other amazing partners in the Ultralounge at Selfridges, in an effort to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about plastic.

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The Ocean Cleanup: Pfannekuchen, swimming, and bioluminescence

Starting off as a joke, the Dutch/German cooking team decided to make Pfannekuchen, the European predecessor of globally popular pancakes. Not thinking of the consequences we started at around 9:30 AM with the cooking, giving us 2.5 h to make approx. 40 Pfannekuchen for the 13 hungry sailors. Needless to say, frying Pfannekuchen on a sailboat rolling with the swell and waves is quite a treat.

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