Subj : ES Picture of the Day 22 2022 To : All From : Dan Richter Date : Fri Apr 22 2022 12:01:08 EPOD - a service of USRA The Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) highlights the diverse processes and phenomena which shape our planet and our lives. EPOD will collect and archive photos, imagery, graphics, and artwork with short explanatory captions and links exemplifying features within the Earth system. The community is invited to contribute digital imagery, short captions and relevant links. The Plastic Littering Our Shores April 22, 2022 Lavinia_EarthDay_Picture1 Lavinia_EarthDay_Picture2 Photographer: Geoff Dennis Summary Authors: Geoff Dennis, Lavinia Gadsden; Jim Foster The photo at top shows what I collected along shore here in East Island, Rhode Island, on November 23, 2021. Sadly, I come across this stuff all too often. Of course, it’s not just the beaches in Rhode Island that are being contaminated by plastics, trash, flotsam and other debris; it’s happening pretty much everywhere. The oceans can deal with a lot but have found their match with plastic. It doesn’t degrade on the scale of human lifetimes. Included in my “catch” on November 23, are 27 mylar balloons. They came in this summer, blew to higher ground on the island and laid in wait until the vegetation died off, which revealed their hiding places. In addition, I found 25 single use, plastic bottles that had come ashore since September 6. The running tally on these two most numerous items collected, which began in 2015, now stands at 489 bottles/cans (99.9% plastic bottles) and 558 mylar balloons. Note that the four lobster pots washed in on a nor’easter earlier in November. Today marks the 52^nd Earth Day. Few would argue that our lives would be better without plastic, but our ocean’s health, and indeed our planet’s health, suffers as this plastic waste increasingly litters our shores. On occasion, my debris removal runs are happily interrupted by unexpected sightings that take my breath away, such as the snowy owl (bottom photo) -- one of three I spotted in a time span of an hour or so. These sporadic wintertime visitors were part of an irruption in the autumn of 2021. * East Island, Rhode Island Coordinates: 41.5312, -71.2716 Related EPODs The Plastic Littering Our Shores Odd-Radius Lunar Halos Encircling Jupiter and Saturn Archive - Skipping Stones Archive - Waiting for the Grayline Terraces Dryland Farming Ocean Eddies and the Titanic Disaster More... Applied Sciences Links * BBC: World Water Crisis * Indoor Air Quality * Mathematics in Nature * A Mathematical Nature Walk * NASA: Applied Earth Sciences * Remote Sensing Tutorial - Earth Science Picture of the Day is a service of the Universities Space Research Association. https://epod.usra.edu --- up 7 weeks, 4 days, 21 minutes * Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1:317/3) .