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she did a very good job she answered everything right

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This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In the classic 1967 movie, The Graduate, a newly minted college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman is told by an older friend that the future would be guided by "one word: plastics." Although the older man's prediction did not refer to the future of marine ecology, the state of the world's oceans has, ironically, borne it out.

Most recently, footage of the Japanese tsunami of 2011 and the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have vividly underscored the deterioration of some of the world's most remote seas, showing them to be veritable garbage soups, awash in chunks of junk including metals, glass, rubber, medical waste, fishing gear, but most of all, plastics.

Plastic debris of all sizes, including bottles, cups, bags, toothbrushes and grain-sized pieces, represents from 60 to 80 percent of the world's total marine debris, according to the EPA.

Garbage in; Garbage Out

Marine garbage comes from many sources, including galley waste and other trash from ships, recreational boaters, fishermen and offshore oil and gas facilities; boxes and merchandise from large containers ships; rivers that carry storm water-runoff and other waste; poorly maintained landfills; and beach litter.

Studies show that marine plastic harms 267 species worldwide, including species of sea turtles, seabirds and marine mammals - some of which are endangered. Animals are most likely to be hurt by marine garbage after becoming entangled in it or by mistaking it for prey and eating it. For example, sea turtles commonly eat indigestible, potentially gut-clogging plastic objects because these objects look so much like one of their favorite foods: jellyfish.

Another problem: unsightly beached marine debris that washes ashore may discourage income-generating tourism in coastal communities.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Due to varied oceanic and atmospheric forces, marine garbage is concentrated in five major gyres in the world's oceans. One of these is the North Pacific gyre - commonly called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - which occupies most of the northern Pacific Ocean, an area of about 10 million square miles. One study suggests that the total mass of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is six times that of plankton! Debris from the patch commonly washes up on beaches in Hawaii, along the Pacific Northwest coast and in Alaska.

Citizen Scientists Pitch In

In light of the sheer physical enormity of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the complexity of its causes, what can we possibility do about it?

Perhaps help protect some vulnerable populations of wildlife from marine garbage in coastal regions, according to the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) - a citizen science group that monitors marine resources and ecosystem health at more than 350 beaches from northern California to Alaska. Although COASST, which receives funding from the National Science Foundation, has long focused on collecting data on beach-cast seabird carcasses as an indicator of coastal health, the group will soon also focus on collecting data on beached marine debris. Resulting data could be used to help support efforts to reduce the impacts of marine debris on coastal wildlife.

Identifying Vulnerable Beaches

Here's how COASST's marine debris program would work: on a monthly basis, COAAST volunteers would collect data on the locations and characteristics of beached marine debris. Debris data could be intersected with information about the location and abundance of coastal wildlife. Resulting analyses could be used to help prioritize the where, when and what of beach cleanups.

For example, suppose scientists identified as a particular threat the potential for seals to become entangled in marine debris with "loops" - discarded plastic holders for six packs, packing straps, boat line and fishing nets or anything else a seal could stick its head through. Volunteers could sift through the COASST marine debris database to identify the locations of large concentrations of "loopy" debris during periods when seals are also abundant.

Kicking off the new COASST program

COASST is currently rigorously pilot testing its new marine debris program. The group plans to start recruiting into this new program volunteers from northern California to the Alaskan coast in spring 2015.

Watch the accompanying video TKTK

Learn more about marine garbage and how it is being addressed by COAAST in the accompanying video, Talking Trash.

The growing power of citizen science

The increasing importance of citizen science to scientific advancement and the many and varied citizen science programs supported by National Science Foundation are discussed in an article, Novel Answer to That Perennial "Earth Day" Question: "What Can I Do to Help?"

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

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Citizen Science Aims to Clean Up Pacific Plastics

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This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. In the classic 1967 movie, The Graduate, a newly minted college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman is told by an older friend that the future would be guided by "one word: plastics."

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1. Stop using plastic shopping bags: We use 1 TRILLION plastic bags per year -1,000,000,000,000 worldwide

2. Stop buying bottled water: 9/10 water bottles are NOT RECYCLED in the United States

3. Recycle your plastics DON'T throw them in the trash

4. Remember that EVERYTHING LEADS TO THE OCEAN

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Who knows about the Great Pacific (or Atlantic) Garbage Patch?

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Who knows about the Great Pacific (or Atlantic) Garbage Patch?

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yes, i know about this and i believe the problem is that it is killing the animals and making the ocean dirty.

we can spread the word by first finding out where it is coming from and inform them what its doing to the ocean and how its hurting people and give a consequince if it cointinueds to haqppen.

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What is being done to clean up this mess?

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What is being done to clean up this mess?

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People are goin in the water to try and pick it up.

Boats with like nets are picking it up.

People on boats are going around grabing the trash.

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What effects does this garbage have on the environment

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What effects does this garbage have on the environment

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kills animals.

Makes the ocean dirty.

Makes area stink.

Pollutes the air.

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the circuler motion from the gyre draws debris into this stable center where is becomes trapped.

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How did it come to be in the middle of the Pacific/Atlantic?

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How did it come to be in the middle of the Pacific/Atlantic?

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The trash gets trapped between two main gyres that act as a whirlpool and collect this trash. In some areas the plastics are estimated to be 90 feet thick.

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A combination of oceanic and atmospheric forces causes trash, free-floating sea life (for example, algae, plankton, and seaweed), and a variety of other things to collect in concentrations in certain parts of the ocean.

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Related Articles Around the Web

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and doing to WordPress what Airbnb did to Craigslist.

Social and Centralized

WordPress, Drupal, and the custom CMS solutions of the world are all independent, non-connected instances that each need to be updated individually. There are over 87 million instances of WordPress alone in the world, and each security upgrade, feature update, and every other single thing has to be updated for each site individually.

By contrast, RebelMouse is a social, centralized platform built to keep up with the speed of the tech giants. Our updates are pushed out to all of our sites at once (and sometimes even multiple times a day) with content creation tools integrated directly into social APIs. We can get clients off of clunky CMSs and into the future in a matter of days. Many of our clients have seen page views and unique visitors grow anywhere from 50-300% literally within the first days of launch.

We iterate with the times and tell you what's changing in the world, how we've reacted to it, and how it's built into the updates you get from the platform. Our creative agency team trains your teams or takes on special projects.

Easy Migrations - the Re-Platform Remastered

We create growth with every re-platform. And it doesn't take months, it takes hours or days. We can suck up a WordPress site, optimize its page speed, the user experience, the balance of ads, and how you monetize. We do it in our sleep now.

We are simply the best in the world at this and have taken it to another level.

You'll grow in SEO, you'll grow in social, you'll grow in return users, you'll grow in the amount your users share, and that will, in turn, grow your total audience.

We can set up test environments you send traffic to and show the dramatic comparison. We create growth.

A Better Experience for Readers - Social UX for Media

Everybody is building media sites wrong. We make it look simple. All the hard technology is at work behind the scenes. For readers, your content shines, is shareable, and your website becomes a rabbit hole that pulls users into more content that creates more sharing.

Better Social Distribution Tools - Cross-Platform Reach

It isn't just about publishing. There's a new content life cycle on the internet that leads to fast organic growth at dramatically lower cost. The key is understanding how to use social to your advantage instead of being lost in the noise. RebelMouse is a contagious media company, and the software turns organic growth into an efficient, repeatable, and scalable process.

Better Authoring Tools

Your writers, editors, creators, and community deserve tools that make them fast and efficient. It's also important that they follow a process that leads to best practices, so that the CMS itself is training your team with every post as they onboard.

Grabbing social content, building listicles and slideshows - RebelMouse makes everything simple, clean, and easy for writers.

Analytics and Management Tools

But it's also important for you to manage your writers, see their performance, enable them to learn from each other, and help them become data driven. RebelMouse analytics provide you with a clear view of who is performing, what posts are working, and where that content is gaining traction.

We also have deep Google Analytics integration, so you can easily add in components, promos, third-party units, and ad units. But most importantly, as they're being added, they are set up in staged environments automatically, and the traffic performance from these tests can be traced back to impact on bounce rate, pages/session, session duration, number of shares, percent of shares per visit, and unique custom goals for your business.

You might have the feeling we could go on a bit longer. We could! This is a passion for us. Come talk to us and let's get growing together.

Related Articles Around the Web

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

# data[].attributes.headline
                                       Great Pacific (or Atlantic)Garbage Patch

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                                       Great Pacific (or Atlantic)Garbage Patch

# data[].attributes.body
Located halfway between the west coast of the United States and Japan floats a mass of plastic twice the size of Texas.

It is a swirling mass of plastic waste caused by 80 percent land run off and 20 percent ship dumping.