We arrived in Lanzarote to pick up new crew, and decided to stay to fix a few things on the boat. While fixing and waiting for parts the crew did a lot of diving (the crew needed some seasoning), rented a car to look at beaches, and took the dingy out with the manta trawl. All of this activity sounds like a lot of fun, and it is but at the same time the crew was assessing the marine environment, counting plastics on the beaches, and collecting trash with the manta trawl. The crew got their first in-depth look at micro plastics in our environment, as well as their first lesson on how healthy ecosystems can degenerate over time. The diving illustrated a classic example of a once healthy and balanced ecosystem being upset by invasive species, over fishing and pollution. The marine environment we found consisted of bare rock, long spiny Caribbean sea urchin and some very small tropical fish. We did find a few tunicates and some soft coral tiding out in a lava sea cave. Unfortunately the large fish were fished out, the sea urchins cleaned house, and pollution damaged the tidal zones (see Ritter travel blog for more of the marine environment story).
The beaches' were beautiful and plentiful. But they were also compromised. We looked at a southern facing beach, a northwesterly facing beach and an west facing estuary. The island of Lanzarote is situated in the southerly currents downstream from all of Europe and North Africa. As expected the southerly beach that was not directly in the current stream showed little in terms of small plastics, but we did find large pieces of trash most likely from the local community. We also found old fishing gear off the small beach, rotting away. In the west facing estuary we found large and small pieces of trash spread out over the entire area. There were concentrations in tide lines from the ocean as well as pieces strewn all overcoming the river. We took some time to sieve the surface sand in square meters and found a good amount of broken down small plastic particulates, having tumbled around in the sea and sand, journeying from afar to land on this beach. The estuary is a good example of long ranging plastics floating with the currents intermingling with new plastic debris just making their debut into the ocean. On the northwest facing beach we really hit pay dirt, for the kind of person who hunts transatlantic plastic particles. We found the tide line wracked with nurddles (pre-production plastic pellets shipped to factories round the world) and small worn down plastic bits of all different colors. We also found a ton of tar, coming from ships passing by, as the Canaries do not have natural oil seepage from the ocean floor. We found the beach littered with lengths of ropes and fishing lines that we come to expect on beaches facing ocean currents. We even salvaged one length of rope 40 meters long for use on the Sea Dragon. We brought some sand back to the boat from the northwest facing beach to take a closer look with the microscope. The view was dreadful. There were very small pieces of plastic and rope intermixed perfectly with the sand grains and organic materials. From the dinghy trawl with the neuston net we found a similar story of large and small plastics. We spent a lot of time with backs bent sieving out and categorizing the different sizes and origins of the materials; man made in one pile, organic in another. After all this sorting, we dried out the similar sized plastic and organics, and took the weight of each. To our dismay, we found the organics only out-weighted the man-made content by 4%. Please join in our expedition of discovery to see what is really happening to our environment. From these few transect we can already see that we have a problem with plastics in our environment, from ship and shore. Please help us create a solution.
We found similar results in beach transects in Morocco.
