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Welcome to the Plasticene. If you’re under age 70, it’s possible you’ve lived in the Plasticene for your entire life. It’s a new geologic age some scientists have proposed to mark the near-universal spread of plastic around Earth. Since the 1950s, researchers say, we’ve been living in the Age of Plastics.
You may have heard of another relatively new time period—the Anthropocene, or Epoch of Humans. (Yes, we live in confusing times.) However, the Age of Plastics isn’t meant to replace that. Instead, the Age of Plastics is a smaller piece of the Epoch of Humans that started in the mid-20th century. Scientists contend it deserves special recognition because, unlike many things we leave behind, plastics can leave a distinct mark in the fossil record.
Many strange things have begun appearing in the Age of Plastics, especially in our oceans and along our shores. Some are so new, scientists are just finding words for them. What do you call an animal that makes its home on plastic? How about one that accidentally swallows a bottle cap? For that reason, a team led by Linsey Haram from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Williams College-Mystic Seaport and Hawai’i’s International Pacific Research Center put together a list of terms poised to become more common in the future. Here are 12 words that describe the new age:
Plasticene
The Age of Plastics, a proposed new age in Earth's history that began with the proliferation of plastics in the 1950s. Scientists believe the buildup of plastics will leave traces in the fossil record. The "Plasticene" would fit inside the larger "Anthropocene," or Epoch of Humans. (Credit: Bo Eide. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)
Plastisphere
Communities of organisms that live on floating plastic. While originally this word referred to only microbes, scientists now propose expanding it to include entire communities associated with plastics, from tiny bacteria to large bivalves and even fish. (Credit: Nancy Treneman)
Epiplastic
Living on plastic. (Credit: Justin Hoffman/Greenpeace)
Plasticized
Describes environments or animals made more "plastic" by the spread of plastic pollution. "Plasticized animals" are ones that eat plastic inadvertently or get tangled in plastic litter, like this seal. (Credit: Nels Israelson. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)
Plastivore
An organism that ingests plastic accidentally, often mistaking plastic for one of its natural foods. The Laysan albatross has become a poster-child plastivore: These birds pick up plastic as they search the water's surface for food—food which they often feed to their chicks. While adults can vomit up the plastic, baby chicks can't, so it remains trapped in their stomachs. (Credit: Claire Fackler/NOAA)
Plastiglomerate
A hard material that forms when molten plastic fuses with rock or other materials. This can happen when plastic burns in campfires, especially on beaches. (Credit: Museon. Creative Commons License: Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
Pyroplastic
A mass of melted plastic debris found on beaches. Unlike plastiglomerates, pyroplastics contain only plastic, making them less dense and able to float in seawater. (Credit: minustide. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)
Plasticrust
Plastic debris attached to a rocky shore. A team of Portuguese scientists led by Ignacio Gestoso coined the term after discovering them on an island in Madeira in 2016. (Credit: Ignacio Gestoso)
Plastitrash
Garbage, litter, debris or other waste made of any kind of plastic. (Credit: KimF. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)
Plastic Confetti
Small, multicolored plastic fragments that form as larger plastic pollution degrades. Though long used in toy and party decoration stores, the term "plastic confetti" first began to describe pollution when it appeared in the Pacific Ocean, according to the paper's authors. (Credit: Annie Crawley)
Plastic Cycle
The origin and movement of plastic between different environments. This includes human environments, such as places that produce or transform plastic. (Credit: Bdx. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
Nurdles
Tiny beads or pellets of plastic that act as raw materials for manufacturing plastic products. A word of many faces, "nurdle" has also been thrown around in the sport of cricket and described globs of toothpaste. (Credit: gentlemanrook. Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)
To read about the discovery of plasticrusts by Ignacio Gestoso and the team at Portugal’s Marine and Environmental Science’s Centre, check out this CNN article or find the journal article here.
Brown Chromis fish in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. (Credit: Emma Hickerson/NOAA)
The ocean is losing its breath. Two years ago, an international team of scientists known as GO2NE (the Global Ocean Oxygen Network) published a report in Science with a stark picture of oxygen loss in Earth’s waters: In the open ocean, the amount of water with zero oxygen has spiked fourfold since the mid-20th century. In coastal water bodies, places with dangerously low oxygen (2 milligrams per liter or less) have increased more than 10-fold. It’s a problem not just for animals, but for people and economies—especially those that rely on tourism or subsistence fishing.
On Dec. 7, a new report emerged from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The ocean could lose 3-4% of its total oxygen by the end of the century if nothing changes, with losses even higher in the top, biodiversity-rich 1,000 meters. Large fish like tuna, sharks and marlin are among the most vulnerable. In the closing chapter, led by Denise Breitburg of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, they created a massive blueprint for resuscitating the ocean.
We’ve pulled out the highlights below, but the key lies in cracking two global conundrums—nutrient pollution and climate change. Nutrient pollution happens when chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus stream into the water and fertilize massive growths of algae, which suck oxygen out of the water. Climate change’s role is more subtle, but just as powerful: Warmer water can’t hold as much dissolved oxygen. Warm water also doesn’t mix as well, so oxygen from the atmosphere that’s abundant near the ocean surface doesn’t reach everywhere that needs it.
Fortunately, these two problems are linked. Cleaning up nutrient pollution can help solve climate change, and vice-versa—and the ocean will breathe easier for it. Here are eight highlights from the new report: Click to continue »
Sarah Donelan in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. (Credit: Patricia Donelan)
Every parent wants to give their children the best shot at life. But sometimes, this means more than protecting newborns after birth. Some species can prepare offspring for tough conditions before they enter the world. It’s called transgenerational plasticity. Sarah Donelan, a Smithsonian Environmental Research Center postdoc, has spent years piecing together how it works. This November she published a new article highlighting how humans could be changing this age-old parental strategy. Discover more in the Q&A here.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Click to continue »
A capella group Washington Revels Jubilee Voices, at the Chesapeake Music Festival. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)
by Sarah Wade
This article originally appeared in the November issue of the Smithsonian’s Sustainability Matters newsletter.
One small bag that could fit into an office-sized trash can. That’s all the waste that remained after a concert with more than 300 attendees, over 50 staff and volunteers, eight performing groups and four food vendors. Surrounding it, eight recycling containers and four composting bins waited for pickup. By and large, the first Chesapeake Music Festival achieved its goal of near-zero waste, to the exhausted but happy relief of its organizers.
Months of effort went into that lone trash bag: working with vendors, buying supplies, and encouraging the public to bring their own water bottles to cut down on single-use plastics.
SERC postdoc Genevieve Noyce (left) and senior scientist Pat Megonigal hold up a soil core from SERC’s Global Change Research Wetland. (Credit: Sairah Malkin/Horn Point Laboratory)
Soils don’t get much credit for their work powering the environment. Even among scientists, they’re routinely overshadowed by their flashier plant neighbors. But as the planet heats up, hidden soil microbes are on the verge of giving plant growth a serious boost.
However, there’s a hiccup in the system. In a new global warming study, ecologist Genevieve Noyce discovered soils and plants are just a couple degrees out of synch.
It boils down to one crucial ingredient: nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen to grow, so it’s a major component of most fertilizers. In the absence of fertilizer, plants get their nitrogen from soil microbes. But they’re at the mercy of supply and demand. In most environments on land today, soil microbes can’t produce nitrogen fast enough to meet plant demand.
In a futuristic experiment, Noyce and her colleagues baked patches of wetland soil to see if that would change in a warmer world.
A female blue crab can produce sponges like this three times a year, each with millions of eggs. But if male crabs are in short supply, she may not have enough sperm to fertilize all her eggs. (Credit: SERC)
If you want to save a fishery, protect the females. That’s been the operating logic for decades among fishery managers, and with good reason: Females carry the next generation. Throw one mature female back, and she could produce thousands or millions more offspring. But for female blue crabs, the story isn’t always so simple.
In a study published Oct. 24, scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) confirmed that a potential snag is in fact happening in Chesapeake Bay. Without enough male blue crabs to go around, some females aren’t getting enough sperm to reach their full reproductive potential. If they survive past their first year of spawning, they risk running dry. Click to continue »
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This October, you’re invited to meet a woman who has spent decades working to save the ocean. The journey has taken her from the coasts of Oregon to Panama, New Zealand, South Africa and the Seychelles. Her name is Jane Lubchenco. In 2009, she broke ground as the first woman to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But her history with the ocean began long before that.
She’ll speak in person about the future of our global ocean on the evening of Oct. 15, as part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the finale for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s 2019 evening lectures. The full details are here. (Spoiler: It’s free.) But if you’d like a preview, here are a few snapshots from Lubchenco’s life, and her unconventional path to become one the most powerful people speaking up for the seas: Click to continue »
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center intern Chaz Rhodes samples gases in the soil with equipment he helped design and install. It’s part of a new long-term study seeking to untangle what drives changes in the methane budget in forest soils.
by Alison Haigh
When it comes to forests, most people think of soil as a static ingredient in a recipe for growing trees. But talk to any forest ecologist, soil scientist, or biogeochemist, and you’ll get a radically different idea about dirt.
Soils are more like living, breathing ecosystems. Their most abundant residents aren’t plants or insects—they’re microbes. Microbes may be small, but they play a mighty role, especially in the carbon budget: They help make forests the largest carbon sink on the planet. Click to continue »
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Marshes Grow Shorter, Denser Stems Under High Carbon Dioxide, Which Can Help Them Resist Sea Level Rise
by Kristen Minogue
Ecologist Meng Lu measures green blades of sedge in SERC’s Global Change Research Wetland in Maryland. Lu led a discovery that under higher carbon dioxide, sedges like these grow shorter and thinner stems. (Credit: Maria Sharova/SERC)
For most plants, carbon dioxide acts like a steroid: The more they can take in, the bigger they get. But in a new study published Sept. 25, scientists with the Smithsonian discovered something strange happening in marshes. Under higher levels of carbon dioxide, instead of producing bigger stems, marsh plants produced more stems that were noticeably smaller.
“I don’t think anybody expected this,” said Meng Lu, lead author of the new study in the journal Nature Climate Change. For years, scientists had known that carbon dioxide was bulking up the total biomass of marsh plants, so it seemed natural to think individual plants were getting bigger too. “Everyone thought, okay, [plants] increased, biomass increased, so the height, width, all should increase. But that’s not the case in a marsh,” he said.
Konza Prairie Biological Station in northeast Kansas. (Credit: Kim Komatsu/SERC)
Scientists Discover Species Turnover in Study of More Than 100 Grassland Experiments
by Kristen Minogue
Since the first Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, grasslands have sustained humanity and thousands of other species. But today, those grasslands are shifting beneath our feet. Global change—which includes climate change, pollution and other widespread environmental alterations—is transforming the plant species growing in them, and not always in the ways scientists expected, a new study published Monday revealed.
Grasslands make up more than 40 percent of the world’s ice-free land. In addition to providing food for human-raised cattle and sheep, grasslands are home to animals found nowhere else in the wild, such as the bison of North America’s prairies or the zebras and giraffes of the African savannas. Grasslands also can hold up to 30 percent of the world’s carbon, making them critical allies in the fight against climate change. However, changes in the plants that comprise grasslands could put those benefits at risk.
“Is it good rangeland for cattle, or is it good at storing carbon?” said lead author Kim Komatsu, a grassland ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “It really matters what the identities of the individual species are….You might have a really invaded weedy system that would not be as beneficial for these services that humans depend on.” Click to continue »
