A family spends time on the beach as scuba divers, Tanasia Swift, second right, and Sarah Sears first right, prepares to enter the water during an underwater cleanup in the Queens borough of New York on Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023. A diving group takes part in a monthly cleanup at a cove in the community of Far Rockaway, about 4 miles south of John F. Kennedy Airport, to help the global effort to undo ocean pollution.
AP Photo/Andres Kudacki
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the divers arrived on a thin strip of sand at the furthest, watery edge of New York City. Oxygen tanks strapped to their backs, they waded into the sea and descended into an environment far different from their usual terrestrial surroundings of concrete, traffic and trash-strewn sidewalks.
Horseshoe crabs and other crustaceans crawl on a seabed encrusted with barnacles and colonies of coral. Spiny-finned sea robin, blackfish and wayward angelfish swim in the murky ocean tinted green by sheets of algae.
Not all is pretty. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers and miles and miles of fishing line drift with the tides, endangering sea life.
The undersea litter isn’t always visible from the shore. But it has long been a concern of Nicole Zelek, a diving instructor who four years ago launched monthly cleanups at this small cove in the community of Far Rockaway, where New York City meets the Atlantic Ocean, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) south of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens.
A throwaway culture of single-use plastics and other hard-to-degrade material has sullied the world’s waters over the decades, posing a danger to marine life such as seals and seabirds. By 2025, some 250 million tons (226.7 million metric tons) of plastic will have found its way into the oceans, according to the PADI AWARE Foundation, a conservation group sponsoring a global project called Dive Against Debris.
Dive by dive, small groups like Zelek’s have been trying to undo some of the damage.
“Every month…
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