Moultonborough Academy students, Shaela Sturgeon, Elliana Correia-Marchand, Dakota Mako, Max Ringlestein, and their teacher, Mr. Shaw Smith, participated in a project which led directly to the removal of harmful ghost nets (cut and discarded commercial fishing nets), as well as plastic waste, from the Pacific Ocean. Plastic waste and ghost nets are particularly harmful to marine wildlife who mistakenly eat the plastic which resemble natural food sources and get caught in the ghost nets.
The MA team volunteered to work on a new pilot project to remove plastic from the Pacific Ocean starting the spring of 2021. The MA team worked with Dr. Barry Rock, Professor Emeritus at UNH’s Earth Systems Research Center. Rock designed the project which had the students use a camera onboard of the International Space Station (ISS) to take photos of the Pacific Ocean. Then students used the photos to identify specific locations where plastic waste and ghost nets were concentrated. A plastics recovery ship received those locations, investigated the sites, and removed as much as plastic garbage as possible.
The students used cameras aboard the space station as a part of NASA’s Sally Ride EarthKAM Missions program. This program takes digital photos of Earth based on school requests. The MA students requested photos of 18 specific locations with latitudes and longitudes corresponding to the orbital paths of the Space Station as it crossed areas of the Pacific Ocean associated with the Pacific Garbage Patch. Of the 18 requested photos, students could only use 2 photos; the other 16 photos could not be used as cloud coverage obscured the ocean surface.
MA students enlarged and analyzed the photos to identify anomalies which could potentially have been areas of plastic debris. Then, the students cross referenced the locations of the anomalies with Google Earth to determine their latitude and longitude. Students shared those coordinates with Rock, who passed them to Mary Crowley, the founder and president of Ocean Voyages Institute. She sent a plastics recovery ship to investigate the coordinates.
The ship found and recovered high concentrations of plastics and several ghost nets from the coordinates sent by the MA team!! Crowley “was very impressed,” according to Rock, the Project Leader. This project showed “a proof of concept, that the debris can be detected from the ISS, and I see our work as a major accomplishment,” stated Rock.
Congratulations to the MA Team – Shaela, Elliana, Dakota, Max, and Mr. Smith- for your exceptional efforts which led directly to the removal of harmful ghost nets, as well as plastic waste, from the Pacific Ocean!
