Shortly after 8:00 a.m. on the morning of August 2, 2009, a team of eight scientists and eight volunteers are suffering fits of giddiness aboard a ship in San Diego Bay, having set sail on a long-planned 3-week voyage to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. On such a voyage, it's inevitable -- there will be blogging. Chelsea Rochman, a willowy Ph.D. student with shoulder-length brown hair and a straightedge smile, inaugurates the SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition) blog before the ship New Horizon even clears Point Loma:
"Believe it or not, I've been interested in garbage since I was about five years old. It sounds odd," she allows, but "I want to study trash ... GARBAGE HERE WE COME!"
Although it's copyrighted, watermarked, and not part of the officially linkable record, you can easily find at Flickr a public photo (not the photo on this page) showing Rochman in the belly of New Horizon. (Search for "SEAPLEX Chelsea Rochman" in google images.) In the flourescent-lit oceanographic lab of the ship with its white walls beginning to chip and rust, she stands at a golden-varnished wooden lab table. In front of her is jumbled scientific equipment made of white PVC and translucent tubes, an open jar, a five-gallon orange bucket, and something -- most likely trashy, briny, or both -- unseen in four pieces of crinkled tinfoil. She wears blue lab glove. The sleeves of her black fleece are hiked to her elbows. Her forearms are tanned. Her hair spills over her face and sticks out like Medusa tentacles. On her face is a comfortable, sparkling smile you might see on a Paris Hilton just when the VIP-room hits second gear. 
Studying garbage is her party. Rochman is interested in how plastic litter picks up and transports chemical pollutants. It's an unfortunate fact of chemistry that many kinds of toxic chemicals adsorb to plastic litter like iron filings to magnets. Plastic weltering in shore waters gathers its poisonous coating, and, transported by wind and currents, takes it on meandering journeys far out to sea. It ends in the unflushable slow stopped-toilet-bowl eddies of convergence zones such as the one in the middle of the North Pacific.
In an August 16 SEAPLEX blog entry, Rochman explains how persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, can climb up the food chain in increasing concentrations. Like zombies converging on the farmhouse, they just don't die and they're bad news. POPs gather first in phytoplankton or krill, and, in all the slashing, biting, gulping, and digesting that begins in the ocean and ends in our tuna sandwiches, fish sticks, mahi mahi dinners, and sushi plates, the POPs ascend through linked chains of predators. It starts, when krill, say, mistake toxin-coated plastic bits for food and tank up on it. Their bodies absorb some of the poison coating of POPs. Tuna eat the krill which have fed on the toxin-coated plastic. Then we eat the tuna which ate the krill which ate the toxin-coated plastic, and get our oral dose of flame retardant, pesticides, or other toxins. In a given ocean, predators (for example, tuna) have a higher concentration of pollutants per gram of flesh than do the organisms lower in the food chain. With each step up the food chain, measuring pound for pound of fishy flesh, the toxins become more concentrated. It's a funnel of toxins pouring upward toward the meals eaten by top predators -- us. As POPs accumulate in tissues of fish, or bird, beast, or human, they're flushed out of the body only slowly, if at all.
(Fortunately this principle of "magnified biological concentration" of some POPs holds true for humans only if we eat contaminated flesh constantly. The fish have no choice. They can't shop for lentils and rice instead of contaminated seafood.)
"Plastics do not biodegrade, they photodegrade," explains Rochman in an August 9 SEAPLEX blog entry, "... the light does not degrade them away, it simply degrades them into smaller and smaller pieces." The smaller the piece of plastic, the more efficient its role as vector of flame retardant into the fishy parts of your fish 'n' chips. That expresses the problem only in the most caddishly self-interested way, an appeal to the very lowest common denominator: what goes into stomachs. Obviously there are broader moral questions. Is it ok that our species has created gyres of plastic garbage and POPs in the convergence zones of Planet Earth's oceans?
In this two-and-a-half-minute professionally-edited video by Annie Crawley at DiveIntoYourImagination.com, see Rochman explaining her work on New Horizon.
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