WESSA and Algoa Bay Hope Spot "Know Your Bay" Talk

WESSA Algoa Bay Branch and Algoa Bay Hope Spot “Know Your Bay” Talks. Plastic and Microplastic Pollution The next Know Your Bay event will take place on Thursday 7th of February 2019 at 17:30 for 18:00 at Bayworld museum, and will focus on microplastic in the air and in the sea. Our first speaker will be Dr Eckart Schumann, whose talk is entitled “Where did the nurdles go?”. He will tell us about the voyage of billions of nurdles (tiny pieces of plastic) that were spilled off the MSC Susanna in Durban harbour during a storm in October 2017. Because the public became aware of the nurdles being washed up onto the shore and reported them to a co-ordinating body (CoastKZN), the scale of the pollution could be traced all along the coast – East London, Port Elizabeth, Mossel Bay, and 8 weeks after the spill, at Gansbaai. Dr Schumann utilises wind, wave and current data to simulate the movement of these microplastic nurdles, and demonstrates the manner in which plastic pollution pervades all our oceans and seas. Dr Schumann is an internationally renowned oceanographer and Research Associate at the Ocean Science campus of Nelson Mandela University. Our second talk will be given as a duet by Dr Dee Allen and PhD candidate Steve Allen, from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and is entitled “It is raining plastic. Literally”. They will present some of the hair-raising data that they collected from remote areas, of deposition of microplastic falling from the sky. They will also present some of the research they are conducting here in Algoa Bay, part of a pan-Africa river plastic survey aiming at 0 Plastic to the Sea. Steve Allen is researching atmospheric microplastic in remote and high-altitude areas around the world with a focus on the French Pyrenees mountains, while Dr Dee Allen is a researcher in urban drainage pollution and co-researcher in atmospheric microplastic. WESSA Beach Clean-Ups The first WESSA Algoa Bay Branch beach clean-up of the year took place last week on the 26th of January on King’s beach and, despite the rain, collected approximately 190 kg of rubbish. As an advance notice of up-coming clean-ups, please diarise Saturday 02 March 2019 and then again Saturday 30 March. Both will be from 09:30 to 10:30 but we will let you know the venues of both these clean-ups closer to the time. Kind regards Lorien Dr Lorien Pichegru Department of Zoology Institute for Coastal and Marine Research Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Honorary Consul for France in Port Elizabeth Algoa Bay Hope Spot chairperson email: lorienp@hotmail.com/lorien.pichegru@mandela.ac.za cell: +27 834878574