Yellowstone Natural Salt comes from a pristine Jurassic era sea. Today's sea salt is heavily polluted from our industrial world.
Yellowstone Natural Salt is the purest, sustainably sourced, all natural mineral salt on earth. Call today (855) 725-8787 We're proud to bring you the new standard for natural mineral salt in the world. Enjoy the healthy taste of perfection!
5 shocking photos of swimming in ocean - plastic pollution
Do you think your ocean is clean? Do you eat sea salt from the ocean?
Try Yellowstone Natural Salt - The Only Pure Organic Mineral Salt.
Visit YellowstoneSalt.com
________________________
Photographer Nick Pumphrey hoped to encounter manta rays on a recent
dive trip. He got his wish, but he also came face to face with a marine
crisis: ocean plastic pollution.
“These heartbreaking images were taken near Nusa Lembongan, a tiny island just off the coast of Bali,” Pumphrey toldThe Coral Triangle.
“Some of Bali’s best dive sites are in this area. But in rainy season,
plastic pollution that has gathered in Bali’s waterways is washed out to
sea. Thousands of tons of rubbish, some of it from neighbouring Java,
is carried on local currents to wash up on beaches—Bali’s south west
coast is particularly hard hit.”
He added, “This problem is hardly exclusive to Bali—but because of
the island’s international reputation as a tourism destination, it tends
to get coverage in the media.”
Pumphrey is an ambassador for Take 3,
an Australian nonprofit that campaigns to clean up beach and ocean
trash for the sake of marine animals and their habitat. The group’s name
is its goal: To get each person who visits a beach or waterway to “take
three pieces of rubbish” away with them when they leave.
Pumphrey’s images make a powerful case for cleaning up marine plastic pollution.
Manta Ray Swimming Through Plastic Trash
“I was on a quick
trip over to Nusa Lembongan with a couple of friends. One of the girls
really had her heart set on seeing the manta rays, and I figured I could
possibly get a few cool underwater shots at the same time,” Pumphrey
told The Coral Triangle. “It was when I dived under for the
first time that I saw it all. It was pretty shocking, an unwelcome
surprise for sure! There was a lot of it, so I felt compelled to shoot
it as well as the manta rays.”
Manta rays feed by taking in water and filtering out tiny marine
animals called zooplankton, so they probably ingest very small pieces of
plastic as well.
(Photo: Courtesy Nick Pumphrey/Take 3)
Divers Floating Amid Abundant Plastic Pollution
A recent report estimated
that the seas contain the equivalent of five grocery bags full of
plastic for every foot of coastline around the world, and that could
double to 10 bags’ worth by 2025.
People in richer, industrialized nations should reduce plastic use
wherever possible, such as switching to reusable containers for foods
and drinks, the researchers suggested. Developing countries are still
struggling to adopt effective waste-management systems.
(Photo: Courtesy Nick Pumphrey/Take 3)
Single-Serving Containers Become Ocean Plastic Pollution
Single-portion plastic containers made up a lot of the floating trash Pumphrey encountered in Bali.
“I spoke to a few people in Bali on my recent trip there. The
youngsters of Bali are very awake to the problem; they are actively
trying to bring sound ideas to the table, like giant water nets in
rivers to stop the plastic ending up in the sea and reusable bottles,”
he told The Coral Triangle. “It is a good start that they are
aware, but it still seems that the problem is not being addressed
properly by those with a little bit more ‘power.’ ”
(Photo: Courtesy Nick Pumphrey/Take 3)
Diver and Manta Ray Swim Through a Flurry of Plastic Pollution
“It seems the big problem is that Indonesia does not have the infrastructure to deal with all of it properly,” Pumphrey told The Coral Triangle, referring to the plastic trash that ends up in the archipelago nation’s coastal waters. Scientists have said that 99 percent of this plastic
cannot be accounted for once it enters the ocean. Chances are it’s
being eaten by marine animals and working its way through the food web
to fish that humans consume.
(Photo: Courtesy Nick Pumphrey/Take 3)
Snorkeler Swims Amid Plastic Trash
Tens of thousands of individual animals, including all sea turtles and around half of known marine mammals, have encountered some kind of human-made trash in the ocean, say scientists. Often they die as a result.
“For people to make a difference, they have to become aware of the
problem first, then aware of personal habits when it comes to purchasing
goods,” Pumphrey told The Coral Triangle. “Like buying the
10-liter water dispensers instead of bottles every day of your trip.
That is a start for individuals.” But governments must act as well to
catch trash before it gets into the ocean.
(Photo: Courtesy Nick Pumphrey/Take 3)
Yellowstone Natural Salt is truly the only "organic standard" Natural Salt on the market there currently is no designation for organic salt in America, but when one is available we should be the only one allowed.
All natural or sea salt is white. The colors you see in Red salt come from a "red tide" algae that dominated the evaporating seas. The "grey" salt comes from a clay liner in the evaporation ponds. Both are used as a marketing "gimmicks" and have no more minerals than Yellowstone Natural Salt. Visit YellowstoneSalt.com today!
Fishing With Bombs and Cyanide Is Taking a Devastating Toll on Coral Reefs
As the reefs in the Pacific Ocean disappear, so does the marine life that depends on them.
All it takes is a few seconds—and a big boom—to destroy an underwater ecosystem decades or centuries in the making.
The boom, in many cases, comes from a
homemade bomb thrown overboard by someone looking for a quick and easy
way to collect fish. The blasts kill or stun the fish, which can then be
scooped out of the water with little effort.
“It costs $1 or $2 to create this bomb,” said Gabby Ahmadia, a senior
marine scientist with the World Wildlife Fund. “They might be able to
get $10 or $15 worth of catch.”
That relatively small amount of catch, however, comes with a huge
cost below the surface of the ocean. Ahmadia just returned from three
weeks in the Pacific Ocean’s Coral Triangle,
where she observed the effects of blast fishing. “I’ve seen reefs that
I’ve been working on for years, and they’ve been blasted,” she said.
“They look like huge rubble minefields. It’s sad, because you have this
beautiful 3-D architecture that a healthy coral reef can provide, and
when it gets blasted all it ends up being is this rubble field that
doesn’t have that nice habitat for all of the fish and other critters to
live in.” Coral reefs take up about 1 percent of the ocean bottom, but they are home to more than 25 percent of marine fishes.
(See Pete Bethune and his team investigate blast fishing in this week’s episode of The Operatives, which airs on Sunday, Dec. 6, at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on Pivot, the
television network owned by Participant Media, TakePart’s parent
company. Join the Operatives on their missions, and take action to
protect all wildlife by clicking here.)
The effects of this blast fishing are long-lasting. “After the 30
seconds that it takes for the blast to go off and damage the reef, it
can take decades for the reef to recover,” Ahmadia said. Meanwhile, the
myriad marine life that used to live in and around the reef disappears.
“Imagine going to a rainforest and there’s all these creatures sitting
there, and then you move around to an area where it’s been clear-cut and
it’s empty of wildlife. Essentially that’s the same thing you’re seeing
underwater.”
RELATED: One of the World’s Most Notorious Illegal Fishing Crews Is Fined $17 Million
Ahmadia said the blast fishing technique is particularly prevalent in
Indonesia and that the people who use it know the damage they are
creating. “They won’t blast along their own reefs,” she said. “Often
they’ll go out to other reefs or to remote places, because they do
understand the repercussions.”
The practice continues even though it’s
dangerous for the fishers as well. “You often see people with missing
limbs or a lot of burns all over their bodies,” Ahmadia said. “People
are like, ‘Yeah, that’s a bomb fisher.’ ”
Although bombs are the most prevalent, they aren’t the only illegal
fishing technique that can harm coral. Large nets or traps can break
coral, causing irreparable damage. Some people also use poisons such as
cyanide. The poison stuns the fish, making them easy to catch, but after
that it kills coral and other sea creatures. According to the WWF, for
every fish that is caught using cyanide, about a square meter of coral
reef dies.
More large-scale use of these methods can also cause damage to the
lesser-known deep-sea reefs that grow many hundreds of feet below the
surface. Sometimes these actions are deliberate; other times they are
done out of ignorance. “For the most part, fishermen are not targeting
these habitats, but in many cases we don’t know where these habitats
are, so it’s easy to blunder into areas and damage them,” said Tom
Hourigan, chief scientist for the deep-sea coral research and technology program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Even unintentional damage adds up—and it doesn’t go away. “Heavy
fishing equipment, especially heavy bottom trawls, can do a lot of
damage to these habitats,” Hourigan said. “Some of the habitats that
have been damaged by trawling or other fishing techniques, there’s very
little evidence of recovery after several decades.”
NOAA, the WWF, and other organizations and governments have helped to
combat illegal fishing by establishing marine protected areas and
funding enforcement and prosecution of illegal fishing. They also work
to educate communities about the destructive nature of these practices.
The MPAs don’t cover everything, though. Ahmadia recounted a research
effort from a few years ago when she was trying to find previously
healthy reefs just outside an MPA. During a three-day search, all the
team could find “was rubble field after rubble field after rubble field.
Because this was a more remote area, they had just decimated it. That’s
pretty depressing,” she said.
Trace minerals found in ancient sea salt match those found in your blood plasma, making them extremely valuable even in "trace" amounts.
Yellowstone Natural Salt is the purest, sustainably sourced, all natural mineral salt on earth. Call today (855) 725-8787 We're proud to bring you the new standard for natural mineral salt in the world. Enjoy the healthy taste of perfection!
