Status Updates From Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Je...

Ch. 5 Going beyond the book, it’s a CM thing to go local. Interesting rabbit trails that I went on were: yes, Virginia, there is an Atlantic garbage patch. South Carolina has a derellict crab trap initiative. There’s a ginormous deep-sea coral reef on Blake Plateau off the South East coast being mapped and documented.

Ch. 5 At this age, it’s important to nurture a love of nature and not let fear over things a child cannot control dominate. I found a video of an Atlantic coral reef to pair with the damage ghost nets can do to them. Since we live near the Atlantic, it makes more sense to me: https://aqua.org/explore/exhibits/atl....

Ch. 4 The chapter encourages beach cleanup and the three R’s (recycle, reuse, reduce). The book leaves out an important fact! The USA contributes only 4.5% of the patch. Most of it comes from Asia. The key for us is to invent biodegradable containers.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

Ch. 4 A test of a model is to make a prediction and compare it to reality. The model predicted that after 20 to 30 years non-degradable garbage would collect in gyres. And it did. The Pacific has an Eastern garbage patch and a western garbage patch. Plastic causes a lot of problems for marine life and right now it’s a problem that’s hard to solve.

Ch. 3 The computer guy and Curt are tracking multiple spills and the beachcombing community help them learn of new ones. I love how much they value the beachcombers who track dates and locations of their finds. It will support what we do with nature notebooking. There’s a fascinating section on plankton and pollock and a theory that bad pollock years go with slow current (ahem, they eat their own).

Ch. 2 The computer modeling in this chapter is fascinating. Curt has a friend whose developed a model that has stored 100 years of current information. When they plugged in the location/date of the shoe dumping, it predicted what happened. The surprising part is this: given different dates, the drift was completely different. There’s a page explaining wave, tide, current, and gyre.

I think the topic of beachcombing is appealing to kids at my school. Many go to the beach for summer vacation.

Ch. 1 Oceanography - The book starts out with a discussion of a well known current, the Gulf Stream. Then it turns to how curiousity about sneakers washing up on the West Coast lead an accidental drift experiment. There’s a short explanation of longitude and longitude. The featured scientist Curt is an oceanographer who seems to have a lively sense of humor.

I thought this was going to be about pollution, but so far it's more about ocean currents and very interesting.