The largest human caused structure..can you guess what it is?

[Liberal_in_LA]

what is the largest structure caused by humans?

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.As it is garbage has become the legacy of our era. The largest man-made structure? It used to be the Great Wall of China. Today's largest man-caused structure is now by far the Eastern Great Garbage Patch -- swirling plastics that gather in a gyrating movements of ocean currents -- between California and Hawaii that some scientists believe to be the size of Texas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/waste-more-want-more_b_1825759.html

[DonRedwood]

1. ;0(

[a geek named Bob]

2. I see

a great untapped source of plastic feedstocks

[panader0]

13. This is the best idea.

Ships could harvest all of that to recycle.

[a geek named Bob]

22. Thank you

My wife and I were driving back from her work place, thinking up ways of harvesting the plastic.

[RadiationTherapy]

30. That is, as yet, impossible.

The debris is of such varying sizes and intermingled with so many lifeforms that it is unfilterable as far as I have heard thus far.

[a geek named Bob]

33. so I need to get crackin'

[RadiationTherapy]

36. Yes, bring tweezers and a coal shovel! hahaha.

[a geek named Bob]

37. or

a bucket that evaporates the water out...

Then you spread it out, and get rid of the organics. After that, you melt down the plastics, skim off the useable stuff, then collect the nasty pollutants.

[RadiationTherapy]

38. But this is the size of a Texas or two. The "organics" gotten "rid of" are living creatures woven

into the food web.

[a geek named Bob]

39. That could be a problem

I'll deal with it, when the time comes.

[Poll_Blind]

3. I actually got this right, sadly. My answer was the "Pacfic Guyre" so I'm not sure..

..if that's the exact same thing but it's close enough, IMO. The strange thing is how little you really hear about it. I mean, you hear stuff on DU but I really don't recall much about it on TV, for instance.

Going to get worse over the next year or two as the material from the Japanese quake circles back from the west coast towards the eastern coast of Hawaii.

PB

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. other sources says it's TWICE the size of Texas. Which is weird that we dont' hear about it.

[VWolf]

10. Out of sight, out of mind. Unfortunately. n/t

[Generic Other]

5. OMG!!!!

[xchrom]

6. Du rec. Nt

[Go Vols]

7. Damn

Wiki says it could be twice the size of the U.S.

The size of the patch is unknown, as large items readily visible from a boat deck are uncommon. Most debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite. Instead, the size of the patch is determined by sampling. Estimates of size range from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi) (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean), or, in some media reports, up to "twice the size of the continental United States".

[barbtries]

8. i guessed right

[Liberal_in_LA]

9. more info

the garbage patch is not this:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a large area, twice the size of Texas, in the ocean, forever swirling with a very high amount of debris. If you don’t already know about it, you might be imagining something like this:



The Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not look like this. Most of the debris in the Garbage Patch is made up of small pieces of floating plastic. Many may be too small to see from a ship or satellite, or they may be floating just below the surface. They come in all sizes, colors, and types—plastics from soda bottles and take-out food containers to polyester clothing and toothbrushes.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t larger pieces of trash floating in the Patch. There are, but these larger pieces of garbage eventually degrade into smaller pieces of plastic, some of which break into microscopic sizes. Very few actually revert back to their base elements; they are simply super small pieces of plastic. The few plastics that are biodegradable were designed to break down on land, exposed to air and sunlight. Water hinders that process.

http://www.sunwarrior.com/news/the-garbage-patch-one-bags-exodus-to-the-ocean-video/

[aikoaiko]

11. Does an aggregate of stuff really rise to the level of structure?

[CabCurious]

12. Scientifically speaking, I have a disturbing curiosity about this...

How exactly does it grow? How does it attract more garbage?

Does oxygen survive within its mass?

Could this spawn new forms of life?

Do we see any mutated life?

Is it alive?

Does the movement of this mass correspond to reporting of Godzilla?

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. To answer your first question

currents.

[CabCurious]

14. TED video on the subject

[librechik]

16. The Gyre, they call it

reminding me of Yeats thoughts about human conflict in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Why did Yeats have to be so right?

[panader0]

25. One of my favorite poems..........

[Scuba]

17. I've had the good fortune to dive in some fairly nice spots, but still man's garbage is present....

... I've had dive operators tell me they continually clean their favorite sites, picking up a new assortment of bottle and cans virtually every day.

[Liberal_in_LA]

23. Survivorman - reality show, guy going to remote island to survive for a week,

always finds buckets and bottles/cans and tarps on the beach to help him survive.

[spanone]

18. makes you proud, don't it.

[Initech]

19. I was going to say it had something to do with garbage, but...

[lunatica]

20. Has anyone thought of the billions they could make harvesting the plastic for recycling?

It's right there for the taking. Just get some industrial sized suction equipment and plow all along the edges. The plastic will stay together because of the ocean currents and all you have to do is pick it up. In time someone could get a huge flotilla of harvesting ships going 24 hours a day for years and years. It's the size of Texas for crying out loud!

There's a great opportunity there!

[guardian]

21. I thought it was a toss up between

Rush Limpball's mouth and his ass.

[redqueen]

24. I knew it.

I correctly guessed what it would be based on the subject line. Depressing, yes. Surprising, no.

[HeiressofBickworth]

26. Hey, I've got news for you

That IS the recycling. A few years ago there was a local rumor that the recyclers were taking "stuff" out in the ocean and dumping it. It was cheaper than actually recycling the materials. And as we know, the corporations are all about that profit margin.

[frogmarch]

27. When I right-clicked to save

the picture, I noticed its label says Atlantic. Is that a typo?

[JackRiddler]

28. Shit, I guessed the answer correctly.

My first thought was, how is this defined? Why can't the interstate - in fact, the entire system of roads on any given continent, insofar as each road connects to every other - be thought of as a single structure? Same can be true of railways, irrigation and dam systems, and cities as wholes, connected by sewage and utility networks...

... and naturally we should all know that the pyramids and the Great Wall are supposedly the easiest man-made structures to see from space (excluding lights).

... Anyway, scrolling down but before I got there, I guessed what the answer had to be, or you wouldn't have asked the question.

Sigh.

[lpbk2713]

29. Pogo was right.

[egduj]

31. It's a myth.

There is a large area that has a higher than normal amount of microscopic particles of plastic due to the currents, there is not an enormous visible patch of garbage floating around the pacific or any other of the oceans.

[lpbk2713]

32. Is that what they say on Faux Snooze?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

[renie408]

35. Actually, it is to some degree visible and only SOME of the contents are microscopic.

But I am sure FOX told you it was a myth, and that's all you need, right?

[trumad]

34. My first answer.