North Atlantic Gyre: Bermuda Island

By Anna Cummins on January 21, 2010

We landed in Bermuda on Sunday, just ahead of the gale force winds that hit 24 hours later. After 9 days at sea, without news, cell phones, internet, we were all deeply saddened to hear the news about Haiti – a jolt of perspective after being single mindedly focused on plastic marine pollution.

The sight of land after days of the endless seascape is always a welcome change - Bermuda particularly so. Gliding in on a serene, still Sunday, we were all silenced by the beauty of this oasis in the middle of the Atlantic. Clusters of pastel colored, stucco houses nestled on rocky outcrops, crystal clear turquoise waters, powdery white beaches tinted pink from corals - we all wondered why we haven’t heard more about Bermuda. A secret well kept by East Coasters?

We’ve been here for 5 busy days thus far, taking part in a number of educational activities organized by our tireless host Judith Landsberg, who runs local environmental charity Greenrock and is good friends with Ron and Portia from Pangaea. Thanks to Judith, we’ve been to three Beach Surveys, toured the local incinerator, will be giving a public talk tonight, speaking tomorrow at BIOS the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, meeting tomorrow evening with the US Ambassador at the Consulate, touring a local recycling center, and speaking at a school. And then, a good 48 hours to enjoy our “honeymoon suite”, kindly provided by BIOS!

Monday morning, we joined our first cleanup at John Smith beach. Crewmember Stiv Wilson, Editor in chief of Wend magazine and rarely at a loss for words, struggled to describe the scene. “This is....unbelievable”. The array of plastic trash littering this otherwise idyllic white sand beach was so plentiful and varied that we were able to make this mosaic here from trash collected in half an hour. (2 PHOTOs- MAKING MOSAIC AND FINAL PRODUT)

On our second beach cleanup- a similar scene - we found one remarkable piece of plastic: a wad of plastic film/sheeting, with a colony of corals, Foraminifera, growing on top. Nature has a wonderful way of adapting that will hopefully supercede our efforts to destroy her...

Little or none of this trash originates in Bermuda – rather this is trash from the mainland, carried some 700 miles by the Gulf Stream, and dumped on distant shores. Frequent beach cleanups by Keep Bermuda Beautiful serve as a temporary fix and a wonderful community effort, but more plastic simply washes up the next day. This serves as a sobering reminder that the problem starts on land – and on land is where solutions must begin. We can’t sieve, net, vacuum, or cleanup all the plastic on the world’s oceans and beaches, we must move further upstream to where the problem begins.

We’ll be blogging much more frequently from now on – so stand by for a recount of our visit to Nonsuch Island and a nearby shipwreck, and our tour of Bermuda’s incinerator – where all Island Garbage is burned in a waste to energy model.