The Iberdrola fake news

Yesterday morning I was startled by the Iberdrola advertisement broadcast on the radio program with the highest audience in Spain. Apparently, five giant plastic garbage islands in the middle of the oceans add up to an area I don't know how many times larger than Australia. Today I expected Iberdrola to announce the discovery of an elasmosaur in Loch Ness, no way. The fact that such a powerful company spreads a hoax of that calibre makes me understand the reaction of some people in the audience when I give a talk about this. If Iberdrola says it, it must be true, right? No, it is absolutely false.

The origin of this hoax is associated with the difficulty of disseminating science rigorously and understandably. Decades ago, US oceanographers discovered that the density of small plastic fragments, just a few millimetres in size, was highest in the central ocean gyres. This is due to the circular currents in each of the oceans of each hemisphere: North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific, and Indian. The phenomenon on a global scale is similar to what happens if we stir a glass of water with floating sawdust with a spoon: the sawdust concentrates in the middle. The average density of these particles in the sea is so low that it is expressed per km2, while in these areas it reaches the figure of 2 particles per 100 m2, and the maximum described after years of sampling is 6 per 10 m2. Doing some calculations that consider the size distribution of these particles and the depth sampled, a maximum of 0.000007 g of plastic comes out per litre of water.
 

So where does this myth of the trash islands come from? The scientists who studied this called these areas with higher-than-normal plastic densities ‘patches’ and plotted these spots on world maps similar to the figure shown in this link from NOAA,EEUU. According to the scientists who created the maps, the name of ‘patches’ was misleading, since one can cross them without seeing anything but water, and it contributed to spreading the hoax that there are islands of garbage in the middle of the ocean. Of course, on the Internet, we can find photographs of garbage accumulations in any coastal area that give false graphic evidence for the myth.
 
R Beiras, 05/07/2024