A giant pool noodle to clean up ocean plastic launches today

On Saturday, engineers plan to tow a gigantic floating boom out of San Francisco Bay, past Alcatraz prison, and to the open ocean. It is destined to begin cleaning up the mountains of plastic rubbish circulating in the Pacific. But is this the right way to do it?

The plastic clean-up begins?

The idea of the project, called The Ocean Cleanup, is to collect plastic passively. As waves lap against the boom, the buoyant rubbish fragments should collect against it. Any drifting animals such as jelly fish, should be washed underneath. The team …

Start to read the story by Joshua Howgego and to continue, subscribe to New Scientist - “A giant pool noodle to clean up ocean plastic launches today.”

Beyond the seawall: a changing climate calls for dynamic solutions

On the face of it, it’s difficult to see similarities between the San Francisco Bay Area and Christchurch, New Zealand. The former is a major hub for one of the largest economies in the world with a population of over 7.5 million people, and home to tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook. The latter is a gateway to Antarctica, historically a market town and port that services an agricultural hinterland, and home to just under 400,000 people. However, when landscape architect and UC Berkeley Professor Kristina Hill examines the two places through the bi-focal lenses of geology and landscape, unexpected parallels emerge.

Christchurch's 2011 earthquake shifted the city's water
table, leading to structures sinking into the Avon estuary.

Both places face similar challenges: how to adapt their coastal and estuarine environments to sea level rise, how to live with a high and rising groundwater table, how to factor increasing salt and freshwater flooding into planning their urban environments and infrastructure while surviving, and preferably thriving, in highly active seismic zones.

Read the Foreground story - “Beyond the seawall: a changing climate calls for dynamic solutions.”

"Made in England" an omen of Antarctica disaster

The soldiers at Matienzo Base in Antarctica made an odd discovery in January 1995—an antique dog sled, unlike any they had ever seen, bound together by leather straps, with a label reading “Made in England.”

Matienzo was an Argentine research base on a small island 30 miles off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was surrounded by a vast plain of white—a slab of glacial ice, 700 feet (215 meters) thick, that floated on the ocean. That floating slab, called Larsen A Ice Shelf, covered an area of water the size of San Francisco Bay. It had existed for a thousand years or more. But this hot summer it looked strange. The men had to go onto the ice shelf to collect snow for drinking water, and it made them uneasy.

The ice shelf was crisscrossed with narrow cracks—which the men nervously jumped over—and dotted with deep blue melt ponds. It was there, protruding from a melt pond, that they found the sled. It must have been discarded by a British expedition that passed through decades before.

That old sled turned out to be an omen of disaster, like a long-buried coffin that resurfaces when a city is ravaged by floods. It showed that Larsen A had been quietly deteriorating for years.

Read the National Geographic story - “Scientists Are Watching in Horror as Ice Collapses.”