https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/plastic-pollution-mariana-trench-waste-litter-deep-sea-dive-a8913281.html

The first article I read that interested me was the Garfield phones washing onto France’s coast. For more than 30 years they were mysteriously appearing all over beaches without any explanation, and then it was discovered where they came from. Even so it is still mysterious how the source of the Garfield phones first appeared, so this captivated me and I wanted to know more about the story. In the article, it says the phones were discovered in the remains of a container wedged in a sea cave that has been degrading over the past 30+ years. It also says the history of how the container got there by boat, but they added they didn’t know which boat dropped the container, what happened at the time, where the boat came from, and how many containers were dropped in the ocean. Unless someone who witnessed the event knew who was in the boat and where it came from, those questions may never be answered. It is perplexing to see how far the plastic from these phones went in the ocean as the article states how there are five trillion plastic fragments floating in the ocean and some were found lodged in fish and other aquatic species living at the bottom of trenches. From this article, I was able to learn how far plastic pollution can travel through the environment and where exactly it could end up.

The second article I read that interested me was the global CO2 emissions record ppm predicted by Exxon. The Scripps CO2 program, which was created by Exxon, commenced in 1956 and has been collecting data on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii since then. In the past 60 years, they have collected data of the total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and I thought it was interesting to see the increasing and decreasing trend over the years. This increase was most likely because of industrialization throughout the 1950s, and it was also a few years before Hawaii became part of the US. It says in the article that the decreasing trend in the Keeling Curve graph is from seasonal variations. It might not be as surprising to see this constant trend, but the data from the Exxon Keeling Curve graphs could be helpful and interesting to study so people can predict what future ppm concentrations will be. While reading the article, I learned about the Keeling Curve and I analysed and predicted that the trend will continue to increase and decrease consistently.

The third article I read that interested me was the dead whale found with 88 pounds of plastic in its body. The article stated that a necropsy was done to the whale which revealed all of the plastic that was built up in its stomach and the cause of its death. It is interesting to see what 88 pounds of plastic looks like inside a whale, although it was sad to see how negatively impactful humans can be to these kind of organisms. I learned how damaging plastic can be to aquatic organisms at large doses and how closely plastic resembles an organism’s prey. This would cause the aquatic organisms to feed on the plastic rather than the prey they normally eat. Also, the article stated how plastic can cause whales to feel full, which is why they normally would not eat real food, leading to poor nutrition, It inspired me to try to think of ways that these aquatic species can be saved from the plastic clogging the ocean.

In conclusion, I enjoyed reading all of the articles that I chose for the scrapbook, but these three articles stood out to me the most. They showed me how organisms are affected by human intervention and how human intervention can mess with the climate, leading to global warming. In the two articles about affected organisms, I was able to view the damage the human population has done to these organisms from a number of factors. After seeing pictures of each species harmed, it was clear to me that environmentalists should be coming up with more conclusions on how to solve this ongoing problem. In the one article about the predicted ppm by Exxon, I was able to learn about the global CO2 Keeling Curve along with the past, present, and future trends. I also made predictions on what could possibly happen in the future with the levels of ppm.