Nasa Animation: Garbage Islands Are Swamping Oceans

By R. Siva Kumar - 25 Aug '15 09:13AM

In the oceans, you can find eight million tonnes of garbage, which is enough to choke five carrier bags for every foot of coastline in the world. As these are carried by ocean currents, they pile upto five giant 'garbage islands' that "swirl around the world's major ocean gyres" according to dailymail.

Nasa has now created a "visualisation of this pollution" showing how humanity is degrading the oceans. Scientists are releasing some buoys into the oceans to track the progress of the garbage.

"If we let all of the buoys go at the same time, we can observe buoy migration patterns," said Greg Shirah from Nasa's Scientific Visualisation Studio. "The number of buoys decreases because some buoys don't last as long as others."

The buoys on the map are represented by the white dots. They shift to five gyres of rotating ocean currents located in the Indian Ocean as well as in the north and south of the Pacific and the north and south Atlantic.

"We can also see this in a computational model of ocean currents called ECCO-2," said Shirah. "We release particles evenly around the world and let the modelled currents carry the particles. The particles from the model also migrate to the garbage patches.Even though the retimed buoys and modelled 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."

Even though scientific buoys are not garbage, ocean currents swirl them like debris to the gyres, according to weathernetwork.

Annually, the planet spews about 8 million tons of plastic bottles, bags, toys and other plastic rubbishinto the ocean. In fact, the real figures may be 12.7 million tons.

Dr Jenna Jambeck, from the University of Georgia in the US, said we are becoming "overwhelmed by our waste", which harms oceanic life.

For instance, if turtles find plastic bags and eat them, thinking they are jellyfish, their stomachs can become blocked and they could starve.

The scientists analysed the information and examined how well it could be disposed of in 192 coastal nations.

Litter on beaches, and plastic from "fly-tipping and badly-managed rubbish dumps" were also part of the unmanageable waste.

Between 2010 and 2025, some 155 million tons of plastic might be filling in the oceans---which was enough garbage to fill 100 bags per foot of coastline.

Co-author Roland Geyer, associate professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said: "Large-scale removal of plastic marine debris is not going to be cost-effective and quite likely simply unfeasible.This means we need to prevent plastic from entering the oceans in the first place through better waste management, more reuse and recycling, better product design and material substitution."

Frank Davis, director of the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in the US, said: 'The numbers are staggering but the problem is not insurmountable."