47

The environmentalist website Ocean Sentry makes the claim (citing Calgary Herald) that:

The massive clockwise North Pacific Gyre is carrying plastic that is over 50 years old. Last year, plastic found in the stomach of an albatross had a serial number traced to a Second World War seaplane shot down just south of Japan in 1944 and identified over 60 years later off the West Coast of the U. S.

A similar claim is made by LA Times:

A piece of plastic found in an albatross stomach last year bore a serial number that was traced to a World War II seaplane shot down in 1944. Computer models re-creating the object’s odyssey showed it spent a decade in a gyre known as the Western Garbage Patch, just south of Japan, and then drifted 6,000 miles to the Eastern Garbage Patch off the West Coast of the U.S., where it spun in circles for the next 50 years.

However, while the first article was written in 2009 and the latter article was written in 2006, both articles claim the plastic was found "last year". I was also unable to find any sources describing the seaplane with a number of different searches, although this unsourced claim kept showing up.

Was plastic from a seaplane shot down in 1944 recently (in the 2000s) found in an albatross stomach, and if so, is there any additional information regarding this plane?

March Ho
  • 18,688
  • 12
  • 81
  • 109

2 Answers2

50

There are earlier sources and more information about this story.

The 23 April 2006 Pacific Northwest Sunday Magazine published by the Seattle Times says:

Take a piece of plastic marked "VP-101" found in the stomach of a dead Laysan albatross chick along with cigarette lighters, bottle caps and hundreds of other pieces of plastic (all pictured in National Geographic, October 2005). Ebbesmeyer helped confirm that "VP-101" was likely a Bakelite tag for a U.S. Navy patrol squadron during World War II, and could, indeed, have floated in the ocean for 60 years before the albatross swallowed it.

Earlier, 9 October 2005, someone on a US Navy related forum wrote:

Did anyone from VP-101 notice the item on page 87 of the October 2005 National Geographic? The contents of a albatross' stomach. Bottom right. Little piece of white plastic with "VP-101". Does it look familiar to anyone? Interesting

along with this marked-up photo:

enter image description here

The later articles, starting with the LA Times article shouldn't have said "shot down", "serial number" or 1944 specifically. Instead, they should have said a piece of plastic believed to be from US Navy Patrol 101 (VP-101), which was only designated VP-101 from 1940-1944, was found.

The piece of plastic was found in a dead 6-month old chick on Kure Atoll according to the original National Geographic article “Hawaii’s Outer Kingdom” by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton. According to Plastic: An Autobiography the dead chick containing the plastic was found in 2003 and the piece of plastic was lost in 2006. The identification of the piece being Bakelite and from US Navy Patrol 101 is only based upon the photograph.

DavePhD
  • 103,432
  • 24
  • 436
  • 464
  • 14
    So, although it is possible that that piece was in the ocean since the plane was shot down in 1944, it is also possible that it was kept as memorabilia and ended up in the ocean only recently. – vsz Jun 14 '22 at 08:12
  • and oh, technically bakelite isn't plastic :) – jwenting Jun 14 '22 at 08:45
  • 4
    @jwenting [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/science/Bakelite) calls it plastic, though not quite as obviously as Wikipedia. It's a thermosetting plastic, hardening with heat, while thermoplastics (that soften with heat) are what we often think of as plastic – Chris H Jun 14 '22 at 08:50
  • 8
    @jwenting The American Chemical Society declared bakelite a "National Historic Chemical Landmark" as it was "the world’s first synthetic plastic" , you disagree? – gustafc Jun 14 '22 at 08:51
  • @vsz Since Albatross can live 70 years or more, it could even have been in the albatross all that time... ( https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/worlds-oldest-bird-just-turned-70-why-so-special ) – Jack Aidley Jun 14 '22 at 12:33
  • 4
    @JackAidley this was a 6-month old albatross chick – DavePhD Jun 14 '22 at 12:40
  • @gustafc given the chemical structure, I'd disagree. It certainly is the first manmade material performing the function of a plastic, but it's chemically unrelated. – jwenting Jun 14 '22 at 13:41
  • 15
    @jwenting what's your chemical definition of "plastic"? When the journal *Plastics* started in 1925, the whole cover was devoted to Bakelite: https://twitter.com/plasticsworld/status/496333971891191808 – DavePhD Jun 14 '22 at 13:50
  • 7
    @jwenting it's a highly crosslinked polymer sharing many physical properties with other plastics. What else would you call it? – llama Jun 14 '22 at 16:36
  • is the implication here that swallowing all this junk was the suspected cause of death for this albatross? Or is that just incidental? (i.e.: If you were to look in the stomach of any random healthy albatross, might you find similar debris? I can't imagine it's all that healthy for them, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's lethal...) – Darrel Hoffman Jun 15 '22 at 16:49
  • 3
    @DarrelHoffman The National Geographic caption for the photo says "cause of death: starvation due to full stomach". The photo in the answer is a just a small portion of one of the 2 photos in the article. The chick had 2 whole cigarette lighters, a shot gun shell, and over 100 other objects in its body. The caption also says that usually the chicks can vomit up the indigestible prior to learning to fly, but a significant number starve to death instead. – DavePhD Jun 15 '22 at 17:20
  • 1
    This is good work, but it raises lots of sloppiness in the LATimes article. a) VP-101 was not a single plane, but an entire squadron. b) The *"shot down just south of Japan in 1944"* claim is totally garbled and almost surely wrong. There is [no plane from VP-101 listed as being shot down (or lost) in 1944 at all, and ~8 wrecks from 1941-3 in various locations of southeast Asia, but again none of them were "just south of Japan"](https://pacificwrecks.com/units/usn/VP-101/index.html) c) It's important to identify which wreck/ location, because that helps corroborate how far debris traveled. ... – smci Jun 16 '22 at 01:15
  • ... to form the garbage pile. d) And the particular albatross that died was in Kure Atoll, not Midway Atoll; it's slightly west. – smci Jun 16 '22 at 01:17
  • 2
    @smci a) This list is more complete: https://www.vpnavy.com/vp101_mishap.html A plane sank 10 August 1944 for example. b) The tag isn't necessarily from a lost plane, "Louis Dorny, a naval historian, called the plastic piece 'typical' of Navy ID tags attached to equipment, like a toolbox, or a bombsight" https://thevolta.org/ewc37-acobb-p1.html – DavePhD Jun 16 '22 at 12:19
  • 1
    @smci and this https://silo.pub/flotsametrics-and-the-floating-world-how-one-mans-obsession-with-runaway-sneakers-and-rubber-ducks-revolutionized-ocean-science.html says "I contacted various veterans from that era...and pieced together the likely story. VP-101 flew amphibious PBY patrol bombers and operated from December 1940 until 1943 or ’44. The tag—perhaps made of durable Bakelite—wouldn’t have adorned an actual plane, but it might well have labeled a toolbox, navigation sight, or other piece of gear. VP-101 lost planes at seven known sites off the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia;" – DavePhD Jun 16 '22 at 14:31
4

According to Wikipedia Bakelite has a density of 1.3 g/cm3 so it would rapidly sink in water. It cannot have been floating in the ocean for 50 years.

Ken Mercer
  • 65
  • 1
  • 1
    This seems like an overly literal interpretation centered around the word "floating". Plenty of dense objects find their way around the ocean only to wash up later, such as coins. – Laurel Jun 15 '22 at 21:58
  • 1
    Welcome to the site. I'm not voting to delete or anything like that, but this might have worked better as a comment. You'll be able to leave those on other's posts when you've sufficient [reputation](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation). – Jiminy Cricket. Jun 15 '22 at 22:04
  • 4
    Ken's answer seems like a very good point to me, although Bakelike was often mixed with fillers such as wood dust so it's possible it could float if foamed or mixed with filler. – DavePhD Jun 15 '22 at 22:26
  • 2
    @DavePhD: ok, but then Wikipedia needs an edit to not flatly state "bakelite has a density of 1.3g/cm3". (was the mixing with fillers a historical thing, or is it still done, and what was the range of (historical) densities)? This is important to the pollution article, because it's one thing if only floating plastics are in the floating garbage pile, another thing if also denser-than-water. – smci Jun 16 '22 at 01:28
  • 5
    @smci the original bakelite patent https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/54/8e/f5/ac666496b972b8/US942699.pdf explains that you can add wood, asbestos, pumice and many other fillers. Any of these would change the density. This is an example of a bakelite float https://www.ebay.com/itm/123051640049 Once you start adding voids to a material, there is no limit to how low the average density can become. There are foam materials sold as Bakelite foam currently https://bakelite.com/products-by-application/phenolic-foam/ – DavePhD Jun 16 '22 at 12:33
  • @DavePhD Indeed, you can make [70,000 tonnes of mostly steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato) float if you put large enough void spaces in it, as WWII quite adequately demonstrated. – reirab Jun 16 '22 at 17:01
  • @reirab good example! – DavePhD Jun 16 '22 at 17:25
  • @DavePhD: sure, I'm not disputing any of that, I'm saying Wikipedia is wrong and needs an edit. This topic isn't my speciality else I'd do it. – smci Jun 16 '22 at 20:11
  • 3
    @smci Wikipedia isn't wrong. To extend the above example: the fact that you can make a battleship out of steel (which a very casual search indicates has a density around 9.0g/cm³) doesn't mean the steel has a low density. It means that the combination of steel and void space (normally full of air) has a _combined_ density lower than that of water. Punch a few holes in it so that the void space fills with water and it will quite readily stop floating… – Joel Aelwyn Jun 16 '22 at 21:32
  • @Joel: I have a masters in engineering, believe me I understand the concept of density. Wikipedia is misleading on the density, if it is/was a common practice to put (a lot of) filler in bakelite esp. for airplane. Flatly stating: *"Bakelite: density 1/3g/cm3"* will cause the reader to conclude that Bakelite cannot float. At minimum Wikipedia could do with a note mentioning that filler is(/was) used, and hence density could be lower. – smci Jun 16 '22 at 22:38
  • @smci Wikipedia does say "Baekeland considered the possibilities of using a wide variety of filling materials, including cotton, powdered bronze, and slate dust, but was most successful with wood and asbestos fibers” – DavePhD Jun 16 '22 at 23:26
  • Wikipedia flatly states: "Bakelite: density 1/3g/cm3" which is misleading. A minor mention that the inventor considered the use of filler, doesn't change that. – smci Jun 19 '22 at 05:49