fairfolio
Saved Projects

An Exploration of the Formation of Trash Islands

CSEF · 2013 Earth & Planetary Sciences

Ian T. Davison · Pacific Union School, Arcata, Humboldt County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective is to determine if air movements across the surface of a body of water have a greater influence on the development of water currents that form "trash islands" than subsurface events. Methods/Materials Volumes of plastic trash, ranging from 250 milliliters to 1000 milliliters, were placed in a 56.775 liter circular metal basin filled with 53 liters of water. The assembly was then subjected to convection, surface, and subsurface currents in order to generate trash islands. Because definitive trash islands did not form, and the convection treatment produced little results, experimentation continued using only surface and subsurface currents. The length of time it took for trash to stop moving, and the volume of floating trash were recorded. Results An average of 194 milliliters of trash remained floating after a first trial of 4 surface and 4 subsurface current inducing treatments, while an average of 279 milliliters of trash remained floating after a second series of treatments. The average amount of time it took for the floating trash to stop moving after the first trials was 35 minutes and 57.1 seconds, whereas the average time decreased substantially to 24 minutes and 34.8 seconds after the second trials. Conclusions/Discussion It is known that about 70% of the trash where trash islands occur is sunken and 30% is floating. No definitive trash islands formed during this experiment. Trash did float or sink, however, and a relationship between the amount of floating trash and the time it took for the trash to stop moving after the removal of a current-inducing source was apparent. When there was more floating trash, it took less time for the trash to stop moving. Only two trials were run, and more trials are needed to support the findings here.

Summary statement

My project is an examination of the forces that generate trash islands.

Help received

My father helped with conducting the experiments and with data formatting and entry.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2013 Earth & Planetary Sciences · Entry J0802

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google