New Hawaii Beach Already Teeming With Pollution

It is one of nature’s most magnificent and powerful moments—or two of them, actually. A volcanic eruption, with the hot, glowing lava pouring over its sides and cascading below, flowing toward the cool waters of the ocean where it turns to sand.

That’s what happened when Mount Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island erupted, creating a brand new beach called Pohoiki, with nearly 1,000 feet of black sand forming a new shoreline.

That was only a year ago.

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Today, Pohoiki is already polluted with hundreds of tiny pieces of plastic, a wake-up call to those in and around the oceanographic world familiar with microplastics.

According to National Geographic, “microplastics are smaller than five millimeters and rarely larger than a grain of sand. To the naked eye, Pohoiki looks pristine.”

It’s not.

While taking notes and gathering sand for a completely different experiment, a University of Hawaii at Hilo student, Nic Vanderzyl, discovered the beach's plastic. They enter the water via wastewater flushed from washing machines or simply from swimmers plunging into the sea.

“I didn't want to find (the plastic),” said teacher Steven Colbert, Vanderzyl’s mentor at Hawaii-Hilo who oversaw the experiment. “I really wasn't surprised. There's this romantic idea of the remote tropical beach, clean and pristine like the beach Tom Hanks washed up on [in the movie Castaway]. “That kind of beach doesn't exist anymore.”

To be clear, this isn’t like Hawaii’s infamous “Trash Beach,” where more visible pieces of plastic like bottles and bags have washed up on shore. More formally known as Kamilo Beach, Trash Beach has been the site of an ungodly amount of debris washed up on shore.

But experts warn that Pohoiki has that potential. Any more litter could have a profound effect on humans, marine mammals and the beach ecosystem.

It remains to be seen if conservation groups in Hawaii are able to stem the tide of more garbage.