Hi, it’s Greg Shirah from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
We wanted to see if we could visualize the so-called ocean
garbage patches. We start with data from floating, scientific buoys that
NOAA has been distributing in the oceans for the last 35-years
represented here as white dots. Let's speed up time to see where the buoys go...
Since new buoys are
continually released, it's hard to tell where older buoys move to. Let's clear the map
and add the starting locations of all the buoys… Interesting patterns appear all
over the place. Lines of buoys are due to ships and planes that released
buoys periodically.If we let all of the buoys go
at the same time, we can observe buoy migration patterns. The number of buoys
decreases because some buoys don't last as long as others. The buoys
migrate to 5 known gyres also called ocean garbage patches.
We can also see this in a computational model of
ocean currents called ECCO-2.We release particles evenly around the world
and let the modeled currents carry the particles. The particles from the model
also migrate to the garbage patches.
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.