Cleaning-up the Sea and Ocean

Walking along the famous Hua Hin beach in Thailand recently, I was shocked to see that the beach and the sea were dirty. It is difficult for me to understand why a country that spends a large sum of taxpayer’s money in promoting tourism, can allow its beaches to deteriorate into such a filthy condition. Why would the visitors want to come to swim in a polluted sea or sunbathe on dirty beaches? This problem can be solve so easily, because pollution are made by people throwing garbage in to the sea, and sending chemical-filled waste water from opened pipes of houses and apartments straight onto the beaches. Health and municipality officials can make changes by giving public education, combined with strong penalty measures aiming to stop polluters from damaging the environment. By joining over 100 countries that will take part in the United Nations-supported campaign “Clean Up the World Weekend”, 15-17 September 2006, Thailand should use this occasion to focus on cleaning up it’s beaches. This clean-up campaign was started in 1989 when an Australian solo yachtsman and builder Ian Kiernan, appalled by the amount of rubbish he came across while sailing, organized a clean up of the Sydney Harbor, during which some 40,000 volunteers removed rusted car bodies, plastics, glass bottles and cigarette butts from the water. Thailand should continue with the good work already done in the South by cleaning up the seas and beaches after the December 2004 Tsunami Disaster. On the other hand, I was amazed to read the other day that there are swarms of lowly thumb-sized ocean creatures called “Salps” that occupied as much as 38,600 square miles of the ocean surface from Australia to South Africa, the Southern United States, Western Mediterranean Sea to the North Atlantic Ocean! From my point of view, these creatures are disgusting ocean polluters, but marine scientists said that salps play a critical role in transporting a greenhouse gas into the deep sea. They eat up to 74 percent per day of the marine plants called phytoplankton, which absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, much of which results from the fossil fuels human beings burned and sent up to the atmosphere. The salps then defecated. Their sinking pellets transport up to 4,000 tons of carbon daily down to deeper water. The irony of the situation is that sometimes polluters can be useful. In this case, the salps pollute the sea water while contribute to preventing carbon from re-entering the atmosphere by sinking it to the bottom of the sea, thus preventing the greenhouse effect and possibly global warming.

Filed under Environment, Thailand |