SpaceShark

Laugh - Why is it when i purpose using the Gulf Stream as an clean renewable energy source I get heckled - - When I said USA only has 1 year supply "Out There" - I was referring to the oil reserves offshore - I thought that would of been a given since that's what we where talking about

La Brea Tar Pit is the most famous - This oil volcano - as it is being called - leaking 200,000 gallons a day - heading towards our countries most pristine beaches and aquatic wild life refuges - makes me very sad since I live on a Florida beach - If it makes its way into the everglades - I don't even want to imagine the horror I heard there is only 1 years supply of oil to run the United States out there anyways - If only some scientist can find a way to harness the Gulf Stream - There is an endless supply out there that would make the hoover dam look like a LED light

I think it would be nice if this forum had an environmental board to discuss issues like this By Captain Paul Watson "On the beach on San Juan Island, Washington, Allison Lance walks her dogs every morning. She carries a plastic bag in her hand to carry the bits and pieces of plastic debris she picks up. Each morning she fills the bag, but by the next morning there is always another bag to be filled. Joey Racano does the same in Huntington Beach further south in California. The harvest of plastic waste is never-ending. Allison's and Joey's beaches, and practically every beach around the world is similarly cursed. Recently in the Galapagos I retrieved plastic motor oil bottles and garbage bags from a remote beach on Santa Cruz island. Every year during crossings of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, spotting plastic is a daily and regular occurrence. A June 2006 a United Nations Environmental Program report estimated that there are an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean. We live in a plastic convenience culture; virtually every human being on this planet uses plastic materials directly and indirectly every single day. Our babies begin life on Earth by using some 210 million pounds of plastic diaper liners each year; we give them plastic milk bottles, plastic toys, and buy their food in plastic jars, paying with a plastic credit card. Even avoiding those babies by using contraceptives results in mass disposal of billions of latex condoms, diaphragms, and hard plastic birth control pill containers each year. Every year we eat and drink from some thirty-four billion newly manufactured bottles and containers. We patronize fast food restaurants and buy products that consume another fourteen billion pounds of plastic. In total, our societies produce an estimated sixty billion tons of plastic material every year. Each of us on average uses 190 pounds of plastic annually: bottled water, fast food packaging, furniture, syringes, computers and computer diskettes, packing materials, garbage bags and so much more. When you consider that this plastic does not biodegrade and remains in our ecosystems permanently, we are looking at an incredibly high volume of accumulated plastic trash that has been built up since the mid-twentieth century. Where does it go? There are only three places it can go: our earth, our air, and our oceans. All the plastic that has ever been produced has been buried in landfills, incinerated, and dumped into lakes, rivers, and oceans. When incinerated, the plastics disperse non-biodegradable pollutants, much of which inevitably find their way into marine ecosystems as microscopic particles. Back in 1991, my ship, the Sea Shepherd , was anchored in the harbor of Port of Spain, Trinidad. It began to rain a hard steady downpour. A few hours later, the entire surface area of the harbor was dirty white, as if an ice floe had entered this tropical port. The "floe" consisted of Styrofoam, plastic bottles, and assorted plastic materials, as far as the eye could see, and it had come down from the streets, gutters, and streams into the harbor. And, of course, it was all washing out to sea, dispersed by wind and tide. What happened to it after that? The sun and the brine broke it down into little pellets of Styrofoam and little pieces of plastic - each an insidious, floating, deadly mine set adrift in an ocean of life. And over the years these little nodules have drifted. Many have been ingested by birds and fish. Weeks or months later, their victims decompose on the surface of the water or on a beach, re-exposing the nodules to the light of the sun, to be blown by the winds back into the sea. These vicious little inorganic parasites continue to maim and kill in an endless assault upon life in our oceans. The simple fact is that when you drop a Styrofoam cup onto the street, you're causing more damage than you would by dropping a stick of dynamite into the ocean. You set in motion an invasion of thousands of killer plastibots that will cause death and destruction for centuries to come. Eighteen billion of those disposable diapers end up in the oceans each year; Americans alone toss 2.5 million plastic bottles into the sea every hour. Our oceans are full of floating plastic debris. There is no place in the oceans where a fine trawl will not reveal plastic nodules. Studies by Captain Charles Moore and the Algalita Foundation found that even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, plastic nodules have been found to outweigh plankton by a ratio of six to one. Similar studies in the Atlantic have revealed the same ratio. In the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks, marooned on a desert island in the South Pacific, finds a plastic siding of a portable outhouse washed up on the beach. The stuff is everywhere. I have found plastic bottles with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and English writing littering the beaches of even the most remote Aleutian Islands. And yet we give this global threat very little thought at all. It is out of the sight of land-dwelling humanity, and thus out of mind. The only industry that seems concerned about plastic pollution is the marine insurance business. The intake of plastics into the cooling systems of engines is one of the leading causes of maritime engine failures. Last year, Japanese insurance companies paid $50 million in claims involving plastic-related engine and prop damage. Drifting in our seas are tens of thousands of miles of monofilament ghost drift nets and lines. This same netting ensnares ship props and the necks of sea lions and turtles. Over the years, my crew have retrieved hundreds of floating monofilament nets from the sea. All of them contained the rotting corpses of fish and birds. In a well-documented beach clean-up in Orange County, California, volunteers collected 106 million items, weighing thirteen tons. The debris included preproduction plastic pellets, foamed plastics, and hard plastics; plastic constituted 99 percent of the total material collected. The most abundant item found on the beaches of Orange County was preproduction plastic pellets, most of which originated from transport losses. Approximately one quadrillion of these pellets, or 60 billion pounds, are annually manufactured in the United States alone. You never hear about these spillages in the newspaper, and there is not a single plastic pellet spillage response crew anywhere in the world. The plastic products that end up in the sea from consumers constitute less than 30 percent of the total plastics dumped into the oceans each year. The greater amount comes from accidental spillage of plastic resin pellets produced by the petrochemical industry for the purpose of manufacturing consumer plastic products, or the breakdown of finished products into Styrofoam nodules or hard plastic particles. Plastic nodules are lost routinely in both the shipping and manufacturing stages, spilling from shipboard containers or from trucks onto streets and into storm drains. Oil spills occur every day in our oceans, and major spills occur on average every two weeks somewhere in the world's marine ecosystem. Although these oil spills are notorious killers of marine wildlife, their deadly impact is confined to relatively small areas geographically, and the impact is reduced with time. The Exxon Valdez spill, for example, was confined to Alaska's Prince William Sound, and although the impact on wildlife was felt for many years, the ecosystem is slowly recovering. Yet this other kind of petrochemical spill is more invasive and permanent. This type of spill is cumulative. The spillage is never cleaned up and removed, but accumulates perpetually. I don't think that I am exaggerating when I say that the spillage of plastic resin pellets poses a significant and unappreciated threat to survival of sea life. The oceans are becoming plasticized. This threat becomes more lethal each year as the cumulative amount increases. The impact of this spillage contributes to more casualties than all of the world's annual oil spills, yet we know very little about the problem. In fact, the public does not even recognize plastic resin pellet spillage as a problem at all. Plastic pellets also pose an additional threat. They act as a transport medium for toxic chemicals. Many of these pellets contain polychlorinated biphenyl's (PCB). The chemicals were either absorbed from ambient seawater or used in the manufacture of plasticizers prior to the 1970's. This transfer of PCB's from ingested pellets into birds was conclusively proven and documented in the fatty tissues of great shearwaters (Puffinus gravis). Studies have shown that 75 percent of all shearwaters examined contained ingested plastic. Of 312 species of seabirds, some 111 species, or 36 percent, are known to mistakenly ingest plastic. In Hawaii, sixteen of the eighteen resident seabird species are plastic ingestors, and 70 percent of this ingestion is of floating plastic resin pellets. Seabirds in Alaska have been found to have stomachs entirely filled with indigestible plastic. Penguins on South African beaches have suffered high chick mortality from eating plastic regurgitated by the parents, and 90 percent of blue petrel chicks examined on South Africa's remote Marion Island had plastic particles in their stomachs. It is a global problem, and for seabirds there are no safe places. For most people, the ocean is a big toilet. The belief is that garbage, sewage, and plastics are dispersed and taken away. Unfortunately, nothing is really ever "taken away"; it is simply perpetually circulated. The oceans are pulsating with powerful currents, and these currents keep plastic debris in constant circulation. As a result, debris travels in what are called "gyres." The gyre concentrates the garbage in areas where currents meet. For example, one of the largest of these movements in the Atlantic is called the central gyre, and it moves in a clockwise circular pattern driven by the Gulf Stream. The central gyre concentrates heavily in the northern Sargasso Sea, a place that is also host to numerous spawning fish species. The number of floating plastic pellets found in the Sargasso Sea has been measured in excess of 3,500 parts per square kilometer. The same ratio of 3,500 parts per square kilometer was found in the waters of the southern coasts of Africa. This study found that plastic pollution had increased in South African waters from 1989 to the present by 190 percent. Birds, turtles, and fish mistake the tiny nodules for fish eggs. Garbage bags, plastic soda rings, and Styrofoam particles are regularly eaten by sea turtles. A floating garbage bag looks like a jellyfish to a turtle. The plastic clogs the turtles' intestines, robbing the animals of vital nutrients, and it has been the cause of untold turtle losses to starvation. All seven of the world's sea turtle species suffer mortality from both plastic ingestion and plastic entanglement. One turtle found dead off Hawaii carried over 1,000 pieces of plastic in its stomach and intestines. And recently, a land-based turtle rescued in a Florida waterway by Stephen Nordlinger was unable to submerge due to the amount of Styrofoam trapped in its body, making it permanently buoyant. The amount of plastic pellets present on beaches is astonishingly high. In New Zealand, one beach was found to contain over 100,000 pellets per square meter. Thus, it is not so farfetched to suggest that people are in fact sunbathing on plastic beaches - literally. I have stopped my ship in mid-ocean and found flip-flops, suntan oil bottles, plastic Coke bottles, garbage bags, and even large floating industrial plastic sheets. In each place sampled, we have also found plastic pellets. Once, on the bottom of the Mediterranean off France, I witnessed a scene that appalled me. The entire bottom was made of plastic. Bottles and plastic bags swaying with the tide, replacing the sea grasses and algae. It was especially sad to see one little fish scurry from behind a white plastic bag to take cover from me in a sunken automobile tire. Brushing aside another drifting white bag, I spied a flicker of red on the bottom. What I found was a plastic face staring up at me with a great big smile and two enormous plastic ears. It was the decapitated head of a Mickey Mouse doll. It's a plastic sea out there." Permission is hereby given by the author for this essay to be freely distributed and/or published.

Do any straight lines exist in nature?

Thx Oshmunnies - i imagine the speed of the melting glaciers would be a factor too - but the idea of the earth being capable of expanding and contracting intrigues me

If something is traveling faster than the speed of light - how would you detect it? Can sound waves detect light waves? If you subscribe to the power of infinity - Then it will have to lie in the realm of the space dimension - all of space is but a point of absolute nothingness - which everything single particle of matter is contained - thus you will have your instantaneous travel

The ultimate power of infinity - There is no begging or end to time and space - Everything is made up by something smaller - if we take that to infinity - then infinity runs both ways - our universe is just part of something so big we will never be able to see it - and that is part of something even bigger and so on What I meant about our creation by the pure power of infinity was- if you arrange everything in an infinite amount of ways - eventually that created us - because time and space are infinities - all things are possible Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I guess I have to chose my words more carefully so you don't keep misinterpreting them - I thought when I said the universe has a constant temperature - You would of understood that I meant what makes up 99.9999999 of our universe -space - in case you still don't know - and yes it DOES HAVE a constant temperature

From ewire dot com "Richard Guy in his new book "The Mysterious Receding Seas" Puts forward conclusive proof that our Planet Earth is expanding. The expansion process dictates that seas recede from shorelines worldwide making the landmass appear to rise. Guy states that the isostatic rebound theory is an error in geological interpretation. For over a century geologists have propounded that the land mass rises from the ocean by a process called isostacy. This is because sea level datum has always been accepted as fixed in elevation. All levels on land are taken from sea level datum. This acceptance of sea level datum, as a constant, is the key factor in the geological misinterpretation. This misinterpretation gave rise to the Isostatic Theory. The land mass does not rise, Guy states, but rather the sea levels fall creating the illusion that the land mass rises. Guy points out that sea levels have been falling for millions of years. We fail to recognize this because successive generations accept the sea level where they find it. Each new generation is totally unaware that sea levels fall and still continue to fall. Guy cites examples from early history and the bible from Noah and the Ark to the Exodus. His findings on the Exodus are quite amazing. Guy has uncovered facts about the Exodus that no other scholar has unearthed. You will be totally convinced after reading his book. Guy proves his points clearly and convincingly and takes you into ancient history to show why all ancient civilizations evolved in the high mountains around the world. The Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus, Tibetan, Chinese, Incas and Aztecs all evolved at high elevations. Guy tells you why. 'The Mysterious Receding Seas" will take you back into history on an amazing journey." If the plates are breaking a part - I would think this could be a contributing factor

Warning - Surfed on in to here to take a bite out of science - I'll gobble it all down - digest what i like - ( , ) the rest back out LLTF

It's my understanding our universe is expanding since the big bang from a singular point - So we will only be able to gather information as far away as light has traveled since then It's just a distance gauge for our capabilities to gather information I was just thinking that there has to be more than one universe - like there are billions of suns in our galaxy - and there are billions of galaxies in our universe - Wouldn't there be billions of universes inside - lets just call it God since we don't have a name for it yet Light would be to slow of a median to bind them together - what ever binds matter together would have to travel at - Ok don't call be crazy - Infinity Speed - Go a head and laugh now - but for some weird reason I know I'm right

I stared thinking what would really happen if the polar ice caps really melted away - Everyone all ways focuses on the effects of the rising seas - But I started thinking - what other effects could happen If water weighs 62 lbs a cubic foot - so when you start displacing billions upon billions of metric tons around - Shit is going to happen - My guess is the pressure released from the polar caps will cause frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions I believe a continental plate could crack under all that stress - when it has to realign itself to match for the new external gravitational pressures So my question is - Do ice caps have a force in moving the plate tectonics? SpaceShark

I've been having some thoughts lately and just want to put them out here. 1) We can only see as far as light has traveled since the big bang. 2)If there are other universes - than something has to be able to travel faster than the speed of light in order for them to form - Could this be what binds matter together? 3)If something is traveling faster than light - How would we be able to see it - In the subatomic world -things need to be observed 4)Black holes are dark because light can not escape it - In order for than to happen - things have to be traveling faster than the speed of light 5) Could this be the creation of "Dark Matter" Those are my thoughts for today SpaceShark