Loose lips save sunken ships | Hacker News Reader

Loose lips save sunken ships

hakaimagazine.com

90 pointsprismatic51 comments

Keeping coordinates hidden to protect wrecks from looters is not an unreasonable policy to set, they'll do even more damage to the marine environment to harvest copper, bronze, low-background steels and memorabilia.

Is new mining of similar materials environmentally friendly?

We no longer have the ability to manufacture new low-background steel on this planet due to environmental contamination.

What is low-background steel?

Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically sourced from ships (either as part of regular scrapping or shipwrecks) and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Very interesting. Wiki also says it's not needed for most uses now since that background radiation has greatly reduced since we stopped blowing up bombs in the atmosphere.

"... background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels ... low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications,... However, some demand remains for the most radiation-sensitive applications, such as Geiger counters and sensing equipment aboard spacecraft. For the most demanding applications even low-background steel can be too radioactive and other materials like high purity copper may be used."

I think we do have the capability if wanted, it just does not make economical sense.

Basically we'd need to filter the gases injected to the process to guard against contaminants, which would cost a lot. So it's just cheaper to recycle old steel.

> Most captains would obviously want to avoid such a costly and dangerous situation, but the sheer number of nets draped on Stellwagen wrecks indicates that some are willing to risk it.

Nets are a great source of Microplastics in the ocean, whether lost during fishing or flying away of landfills [0]. New kind of ropes degrades slowly but that’s just a “timer on the bomb”.

What can we do ?

At a society level legislation does not work off the coast: near impossible to find consensus on international zones laws and even more complicated to enforce them. At a personal level you can stop eating fishes. You won’t change the world alone but still have a small but real impact, about the same as when you go to the polls.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X2...

>Nets are a great source of Microplastics

It seems to me the solution is to require (and subsidize) the use of cotton (or other natural fiber) based netting, which is biodegradable.

Cotton in particular is a bad crop choice because it uses a lot of water. Cotton cultivation is a contributing factor to the shrinking of the Aral Sea.

Is cotton cultivation that bad in areas that were not artificially made suitable for the crop by the Soviet Union?

> artificially made suitable

Don’t know what you mean by that but the Soviet having made worse does not mean other countries approach is water-friendly. See https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6843583/water_footprint_of_c...

To produce a kilo of cotton (roughly equivalent to a t-shirt and a pair of jeans) takes 20,000L of water. It’s just fundamentally an extremely thirsty crop.

Not to mention that cotton is notorious for depleting soil nutrients, so it is often grown with very large amounts of fertilizer, which also polluted waterways and their outlets into the oceans.

if only there was actually any good evidence of microplastic impact on health instead of a moral panic. microplastics will sink to the bottom of the sea and get buried under dirt on land, becoming part of the geology anyhow. for something with no clear evidence of harm, is it really worth replacing it with materials that require multipliers more fossil fuels to produce, increase carbon emissions, which are very much proven to cause harm to both human health and ecosystems?

Animals consume them. We consume animals. They re-enter the cycle and repeat.

They are made of fossil fuels, while alternative netting are not.

Microplastics is hardly the only concern about plastic nets. In garbage patches, nets are a major constituent. Marine animals, small and big, get strangled in the nets. Marine animals indirectly consume plastic nets which doesn't get passed on with feces and they die of gastric obstruction.

that is basically a fringe issue considering 80% or so of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste streams in the third world. fix that and I’m sure marine animals will have a much easier time avoiding the rest

certainly the question is: every plastic alternative tends to have higher impacts with regards to emissions to produce it or transport it. knowing that netting is only a minor contributor to plastic pollution, it is worth trying to solve plastic pollution by worsening the problem of carbon emissions? everything is a trade-off, to solve one problem you have to contribute to another

The problem isn't plastic, the problem is everyone throwing it onto the oceans. And blaming the "third world" isn't gonna help

it’s not everyone, it is specifically poorer countries that contribute the vast majority to plastic pollution in the ocean via waste mismanagement. if you want an issue to be solved, it helps to look up and understand the specifics first!

e: since you basically asked

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

Google “global waste trade”, it’s the same mafiosi level as carbon credits: rich countries proclaims to have clean hands because someone in another juridiction accept their money.

Waste management is also a joke within the rich countries: landfills still exists and those recycling program seems nice on a consumer (=voter) side: you have a colored special bin, state flyers tells you how recycling (is supposed to) work and buy sometimes a (partially) recycled bootle or pullover. In practice 5% of stuff put in the bin is recycled, the rest goes to landfill or incinerators.

Both landfills and incinerators are good places for waste as long as they're not next to water bodies.

They don't contribute to the waste in oceans that this sub-thread seemed to be about.

They do: landfill are surrounded by fence and/or buried but most (not all) plastics degrades due to heat, sun, rain, ph of other materials and micro organism. Then all of those little flakes

- fly away with the wind

- are carried down the groundwater by rain. This is called leachate Modern landfills are protected by liners but those have a lifespan and eventually any of them could leak.

Foremost I am absolutely of the opinion that plastic in the ocean is not a good thing.

But I was surprised to hear that at this point, according to at least one person that studies this, removal may have consequences as well. It’s been there long enough for new eco systems to evolve.

This was rather enlightening in that nothing is as simple as it seems.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unexplainable/id155457...

Micro plastics break down into nanoplastics , many of which can function as hormone analogs in organisms.

that is simply false but it does demonstrate the level of understanding the general public, including HN, has on this issue. nanoplastics, once again, have no proven health effects. what does at least have some attested health effects are the various plasticiser additives in plastic. the only actual health concern with plastics is and has always been: will they leach plasticisers into for example food? it only takes a very small amount of thinking to realise that suspended micro and nanoplastics in a solvent volume as great as the damn ocean likely means even if the dreaded micro and nanoplastics make it into your system they will be long devoid of any soluble plasticisers, especially if those happen to be degraded by the sun or brackish conditions

Here's two studies that show changes in the gut microbiota of fish on exposure to micro- and nano-plastics.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32361245/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33199151/

But it's probably fine.

“Proven health effects” is a really high bar. Universal, long term, planetary contamination with a synthetic organic polymer seems like exactly the kind of situation that would warrant an abundance of caution rather than requiring conclusive proof of harm.

That said, perhaps the many studies I have seen showing that multiple plastics have hormone like effects on biological systems en vitro, especially when presented in fine particulate form were just wrong. Honestly could be.

But I’ve seen an awful lot of them supporting the biological activity of plastics and plastic decomposites, and only a couple suggesting failures of replication.

I’ll have to take a look into it again. Have you seen papers that strongly support biological neutrality in fine plastic particulates and decomposites?

Yes, let's just irrevocably pollute ourselves and our landscape until proven unsafe. This strategy has never failed us before.

well it’s only been 70 years or so since we’ve started using plastics at scale, and at least half that we’ve had some form of microplastics widespread in the environment. any day now

Not everything is life or death, plastics have been linked to hormonal/fertility issues. Micro plastics do cause problems but it’s systemic at this point.

The issue with pollution is it frequently becomes very hard to notice that everything is slightly worse. People used to think smoking was heathy as crazy as it sounds, but when most people experienced smoking related issues such issues where normal.

> microplastics will sink to the bottom of the sea

Huh?

Fear of microplastics is not a moral panic. A moral panic would be if we knew microplastics were harmless (making it irrational) and if microplastics were humans (point to a single moral panic were the subject was not human).

Also, the fear is rational when it's a conscientious observation of "we've made a change to the environment we don't understand".

Have you seen the current #1 article on HN ?

> New study finds microplastics infiltrate all systems of body, alter behaviour

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306427

is this really the first MDPI published article where people spent their grant money injecting random stuff into mice HN has seen?

According to 2016 FAO data, roughly 59 mio people are directly involved in fishing. Do you consider taking away their ability to have some income "small impact"?

Besides, most of the fish I eat are sweetwater fish. I doubt me stopping to eat fish would have any impact with the micropastics situation.

Besides, what else am I supposed to stop? Breath, drink, think, or maybe exist?

Pretty much unnecessary rhetoric black-white argumentation though there are many shades in between? There are a lot of compromises that can be made without resorting to "am I supposed to stop existing" nonsense, come on!

TL/DR: loose lips haven't currently saved any sunken ships. The remote hope is that, if they disclose the locations of shipwrecks, fishermen might choose to avoid them. They haven't even considered turning their "National Marine Sanctuary" into an actual fishing prohibition area, because of the "anti-regulatory zeitgeist", so the policy is strictly voluntary, and no one is really abiding by it, but for some reason they remain optimistic.

So this is the "deep state" that Republicans want to dismantle? After reading this article, I'm inclined to say they might as well do it, but not because of how dangerous it is - because of how ineffective it is!

It's quite telling how much the article makes it clear that these fishing practices are absolutely devastating the marine habitats that their perpetrators profit from, but oh no nobody wants to do anything about that because that would be hard. Instead let's try to preserve some "culture" for some reason (but not actually try because that would also be hard).

Not sure that an old shipwreck rusting away is an important treasure that needs to be preserved. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, fishing will damage it. OK, whatever.

If protected from fishing, sunken ships will create an ecotone that will fill all the nearby areas with fishes and shellfishes. Fisheries are money. Do we want money?. Then we need to fight against pirate fishing. Is very simple.

Alternative headline:

Haskell Preserving Legacy Sea

What is supposed to be being "saved" here? If a fisherman unknowingly destroys an object that nobody else ever knew was there, what's the loss?

The article explains that those wrecks are oases of marine life. Those living forms can’t defend their real estate to the court because they can’t speak and because fishermen are lobbying against restriction (of that real estate enforcement).

Ben Haskell try to preserve those marine sanctuaries by asking politely to stop, hoping fishermen love to marine life may restrain them for destroy it.

We have huge industries devoted entirely to finding and killing that life. Why would we worry about whether, when we do that, it's living in a shipwreck we gave it or a reef that grew over time?

Many reefs are also fishing protected areas for the same reason, why this one should be treated differently?

What's the goal? Is the idea to stop fishermen from hurting themselves? Is it that removing a sunken ship would interfere with the natural processes that put the ship there?

Reefs can't be fishing-protected areas because of the presence of fish. The presence of fish is how we pick fishing-intensive areas.

> Reefs can't be fishing-protected areas because of the presence of fish. The presence of fish is how we pick fishing-intensive areas.

Not. Complex problems don't have simple answers.

We don't define fisheries by the presence of fish. We define fisheries by the presence of fish that --can be-- fished. This means normally age, not number. And age can't be measured easily in many species so we use size instead. Distance to the coast, population status and life cycle are also hugely influential.

The article goes on further to explain that, "Shipwrecks create richer habitats that in turn boost fishing conditions, but only as long as the wreck is preserved."

Collect taxes and build artificial reefs.

And governments with teams devoted entirely to regulate this industries and manage ecosystems.

There is an easily measurable economic loss. Marine biologists study management of fisheries since decades (This depends on the type of fisheries in any case).

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