Seeking plane wreckage in oceans of garbage

    The many false alarms from sighted debris not related toMalaysia Airlines Flight 370 remind us that we’ve been using the ocean as a dumpster for a very long time.

    There’s always been flotsam and jetsam, but with plastic trash bags and six-pack rings, which are incredibly harmful to sea life and birds, we’ve upped the ante in our assault on the sea.  

    Much worse is ocean acidification, the lowering of the ocean’s pH, which is a direct result of climate change (global warming). Ocean acidification is a large-scale assault on whole ecosystems, and as a recent U.N. report makes clear, this is no false alarm.

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