NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Materials like consumer plastics, metals, rubber, paper, textiles, lost fishing gear, vessels, and other lost or discarded items can easily end up in the ocean, where it becomes marine debris. Marine debris threatens the ocean and its resources, the economy, and safe navigation. Animals like turtles, marine mammals, birds, and other creatures can die when they accidentally swallow or get tangled up in marine debris. These materials can also crush sensitive habitats like seagrass beds or coral reefs. All national marine sanctuaries face the challenges of marine debris and the harmful impacts that come along with managing this problem. This collection features resources related to the problem of marine debris, NOAA and sanctuary system programs, and the solution to pollution.

In 1969, a team of Guam fisheries scientists installed an artificial tire reef within Cocos Lagoon as a way to reuse old rubber tires. Over 50 years later, the tire reef still sits on the bottom of the lagoon.

In 2015, fifth graders from Falmouth, Massachusetts, noticed a problem. Although millions of metric tons of plastic waste were entering the ocean each year, the people around them kept using single-use plastics. In short, plastics were the norm. To address this problem, the students worked with Falmouth Water Stewards to create a campaign called “Skip the Straw.”

Every year, wildlife and marine habitat suffer from the negative impacts of derelict, lost, and abandoned fishing gear. Derelict gear (crab pots, fishing line, nets, etc.) can capture or entangle wildlife (a process called “ghost fishing”), damage sensitive marine habitats such as coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds, and cause hazards to navigation.

A healthy ocean starts with us. Learn how student leaders in American Samoa interned as part of a microplastics research project to protect ocean health.

Pizza or PB&J? Apple or orange? School cafeterias offer students daily lunch choices, but school-provided meals can generate serious waste, including single-use plastic utensils and plastic foam trays. Lunchroom decisions affect students daily, and the waste from single-use items will affect them for years if they become marine debris. How can we reduce this waste? By empowering students to think critically about their trash and use creativity to design solutions.

These days plastic seems to be everywhere; unfortunately, that includes many parts of the ocean, from the garbage patches to Arctic sea ice. With this pollution increasingly in the form of tiny plastic bits, picking up a few bottles left on the beach can feel far removed from the massive problem of miniscule plastics floating out at sea. However, these two issues are more closely connected than you may think.

Preventing oil spills is key, but since killer whales, also known as orcas, spend much of their time in the busy waters around Seattle, the San Juan Islands, and Vancouver, British Columbia, there is always a chance a spill could impact them.

A hurricane, according to NOAA, is an active low-pressure system that forms over tropical or subtropical waters that rotates at more than 74 miles per hour. They are known for the destruction they cause due to wind, rain, and one particularly dangerous threat, storm surge. In Puerto Rico, we have witnessed the impacts of these storms, the most recent being Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017. These hurricanes were devastating, not only because of the loss of human life and damage to infrastructure, but also the amount of marine debris they left in their wake.

More than a year and thousands of miles later, a soccer ball washed away during the Japan tsunami has turned up on a remote Alaskan island and eventually could be headed back to the Japanese school grounds it originally came from.