JULIA PARRISH: The ocean is a really big place. Particularly

the Pacific Ocean is a really big place. So even big docks

that are floating around after the Japanese tsunami are tiny,

tiny little fragments in the entire North Pacific Ocean. And

one of the things that happens is the North Pacific—any ocean

is not just a bathtub, right? It's something where the water

is moving around, and the water tends to move around the edges

much faster. Those are the coastal currents, and in the

center it moves slower and slower. So like a Cuisinart,

like a Tastee Freeze machine—all of that stuff right in the

middle is going to circle around very, very slowly. And that

action acts to trap a lot of the debris. So we end up with

something that we call the garbage patch, which is that

center. Debris may hang out in that garbage patch not just for

months but for years. And seasonally as the wind patterns

change, big aliquots of that water, hundreds of kilometers

wide, will break off from that garbage patch and slam into the

coastline and may cover a range that's Oregon and northern

California. So we tend to see lots of debris come in

predominantly in the fall and winter when we have patterns of

surface water movement into the coast. Then we tend to see less

in the summer and early fall when the water is going in the

opposite direction. So we are hoping to see all sorts of

really interesting things, just like the birds, there's a

seasonal pattern to debris. We want to know what it is. We want

to be able to document that. We want to know whether pieces of

debris that are coming from particular areas in the ocean

but originally from the land, grace our shores at different

times of year. So everybody thinks that everything they find

is part of the Japanese tsunami, but in fact, lots and lots and

lots of debris before and after and during the tsunami are

from different places.

Falls off of boats, gets swept out of rivers,

comes from the land. The thing about it is not where it comes

from so much but how long does it last? That's the amazing

thing. There are narrow pieces of debris that have been in the

water for years to decades. We're still finding Japanese

glass fishing floats that haven't been used actively in

fisheries for decades.

One of the things that COASST is doing

right now is we're starting a whole new data collection module

in marine debris so lots of people out on the beaches

collecting information about what's there. Quite honestly,

cleaning up the oceans is not something that one citizen

science program can do. What we can do is we can create a

baseline but also—and this is the coolest thing to me about

debris—rather than understanding or writing down what the

identity of the debris is—that's a lighter, that's a water

bottle—what we're writing down is what are the characteristics

of that debris? Is it plastic? Is it metal? Is it a fragment?

Is it sharp? Does it have a loop in it that a marine mammal might

be able to stick their head through? Is it small enough and

in the color range that an albatross might mistake it for

flying fish eggs and eat it? So all of those characteristics of

the debris tell us something about harm to wildlife. Once we

have that, we can literally map the entire coastline and

understand which sections of the coastline and at what time of

year are harmful for what kinds of organisms. And that is

something that can actually direct very broad

scale resource management.

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