Where does ocean garbage go? Watch this NASA animation
Digital Reporter
Monday, August 24, 2015, 1:27 PM - All the garbage mankind has dumped in the ocean over the last century has to go somewhere.
Now thanks to NASA's latest data visualization, you can see exactly WHERE it goes. Specifically, one of the five ocean "gyres" where the stuff is known to accumulate.
The space agency's Scientific Visualization Studio took data gathered from scientific buoys released by its sister agency NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) from 1979 onward.
"Lines of buoys are due to ships and planes that released buoys periodically," the data team writes. "If we let all of the buoys go at the same time, we can observe buoy migration patterns."
The team says the number of buoys seems to decrease over time as some last longer than others.
Even though scientific buoys are not garbage, ocean currents make no distinction, carrying them as it would any other piece of debris to the famous gyres.
"Even though the retimed buoys and modeled particles did not react to currents at the same times, the fact that the data tend to accumulate in the same regions show how robust the result is," the teams days.
