via FastCoExist
Courtesy of NASA, see where the 5 trillion pieces of floating plastic floating we’ve put in our oceans.
Next year, a 20-year-old inventor will begin trawling the world’s oceans to try to clean up plastic garbage patches—the sprawling clumps where most of the world’s 5 trillion pieces of plastic trash end up. But a new animation shows exactly how hard that task will be: As soon as some plastic is cleaned up, ocean currents will bring more to take its place.
The animation follows the general path that most trash—from tiny particles to buoys—takes in the ocean to land in one of a handful of patches.
The animators dropped some virtual particles into the model and watched what happened. “As a quick test, we distributed a bunch of particles evenly around the world and let the model’s time varying vector field move the particles around,” says Greg Shirah, the lead animator. “After several years of simulated time, many of the particles began to clump into slower moving gyres—also called garbage patches.”
Read more: Watch The Swirling Islands Of Plastic Trash That Are Filling Up Our Oceans
The Latest on: Ocean garbage patches
via Google News
The Latest on: Ocean garbage patches
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via Bing News
