Tons of garbage are floating around in the world’s oceans. Where does it go? What might the patterns of garbage movement reveal about ocean currents?

NASA’s Data Visualization Studio has created a series of animations of the so-called ocean garbage patches. They used data collected by floating, scientific buoys that NOAA has been deploying for the past 35 years. The resultant videos dramatically illustrate how large garbage patches develop in the ocean.

In a series of videos, NASA animators show the buoys as white dots against a world map and where they have moved over time. You can see where the buoys move in two different simulations: one based on the actual deployment date and one in which all buoys are released simultaneously. The animations clearly show garbage migration patterns.The buoys end up in one of five known gyres in the ocean, where the largest ocean garbage patches develop.

NASA animators also used a computational model of ocean currents called ECCO-2 to see how ocean currents would move simulated buoys if they were released evenly around the world. In all these visualizations, the buoys end up in the same regions of the ocean.

Below, is one of the NASA videos that summarizes the above information: