Really this stuff shouldn't stop at home, it should go straight to the Great Pacific
Gyre where it will end up after one use anyways.
The EAC starts on the west edge of the South Pacific
gyre where it collects warm, nutrient poor water.
In 2008 the predicted existence of a floating mass of pelagic plastic, a giant Garbage Patch, was confirmed in the stable waters of the North Atlantic
gyre where plastic debris is accumulating over an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
As may be expected from the positions of ocean currents, most mixing in the upper layers of the ocean takes place on the western boundaries of ocean
gyres where the current speeds are greatest.
For years, scientists have warned that the world's oceans are becoming a plastic soup, with ocean
gyres where plastic and other debris build up (also known as «garbage patches») covering a quarter of the earth's surface.
Not exact matches
In 2010 she hitchhiked across the Pacific Ocean on freighter ships to the United States,
where she worked with the 5
Gyres Institute in California on the first ever comprehensive study of plastic in the world's oceans.
What we witnessing is turning and turning in a widening
gyre,
where the falcon can not hear the falconer.
If you trawl a fine mesh net through any of the globe's five subtropical
gyres — giant ocean vortexes
where currents converge and swirl unhurriedly — you will haul on deck a muddle of brown planktonic goop, the occasional fish, squid or Portuguese man - of - war — and, almost certainly, a generous sprinkling of colourful plastic particles, each no larger than your fingernail.
Many of them swam into the center of the
gyre,
where seaweed accumulates.
Researchers at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation documented an increase in plastic debris in the Central Pacific
Gyre five-fold between 1997 and 2007,
where the baseline in 1997 showed plastic pieces outnumbered plankton on the ocean surface 6:1.4 Photo courtesy NOAA.
Each year enough is thrown away to circle the earth 4 times, with some 10 - 20 million tons reaching the ocean
where it harms sea life, kills birds and contributes to the famous plastic
gyre.
Where the poleward & equatorward currents of this intensified circulation converge — the centre of the
gyres — surface water is pumped downwards into the ocean interior in a process known as Ekman pumping.
In an email chat, Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers University and Braddock Linsley of Columbia University, whose related work was explored here in 2013, said the Argo analysis appeared to support their view that giant subtropical
gyres are the place
where heat carried on currents from the tropics descends into the deeper ocean.
The last timeframe in the Sub-polar
Gyre was not published in Curry & Mauritzen's paper because they had very little data from the western Sub-polar
Gyre in that period — the volume budget would therefore be biased towards the salty eastern atlantic,
where the warm, salty subtropical waters reside.
According to the Five
Gyres Institute, these tiny plastic beads, used in face & body scrubs and toothpaste, are washed directly down the drain and into our water systems,
where they harm our waterways and the animals that live there.
As part of this collaborative initiative, 5
Gyres will offer envelopes to beach clean up participants, so they can send found pieces of polystyrene trash to congressional representatives in Sacramento —
where this year legislators voted against SB - 705, a statewide polystyrene ban.
Where things get a little mysterious is in the attribution of the warming subsurface to a change in the NA
gyre circulation, which is attributed to a switch in the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) from a positive to a negative phase.
The 5
Gyres Institute, a leading research organization focusing on plastic pollution in the world's oceans, recently discovered microbeads on a research expedition in the Great Lakes,
where they found as many as 466,000 microplastics per square kilometer.
It's a region of the North Pacific ocean
where the northern jet stream and the southern trade winds, moving opposite directions, create a vast, gently circling region of water called the North Pacific
Gyre — and at its center, there are tons of plastic garbage.
Most of the deep ocean warming is occurring in the subtropical ocean
gyres - vast rotating masses of water in each ocean basin
where near - surface currents converge and are forced downward into the ocean interior.
This is
where the majority of deep ocean warming is occurring in the last decade or so - in the subtropical
gyres.
Some of the warm water would be subducted by Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation / Thermohaline Circulation, some would be carried by ocean currents into the Arctic Ocean
where it would melt sea ice, and the remainder would be spun southward by the North Atlantic
gyre toward the tropics so it could be warmed more by the effects of the slower - than - normal trade winds.
On the other hand, during the negative phase of the AO (Arctic Oscillation), water motion in the Arctic Ocean is anticyclonic and the Beaufort
gyre is strengthened, so that ice is retained and thickened both in the Canada Basin and along the Siberian coastline,
where it may survive summer melting.
In response to your question I would refer you to my comment above Dave Wendt (14:39:39):
where I discuss the Rigor and Wallace paper of 2004 which demonstrated that the decline in sea ice age and thickness began with a shift in state in Beaufort
Gyre and the TransPolar Drift in 1989 which resulted in multiyear ice declining from over 80 % of the Arctic to 30 % in about one year and that the persistence of that pattern has been responsible for the continuing decline.
The boats can be retrofitted to deal with any environmental disaster at sea
where it's difficult or dangerous to send human workers: The original vision — pre-Deepwater — was for the boats to head the Pacific
Gyre and pick up trash in nets, because it seems that no human is ever going to lift a finger to clean it up.
Growing
where the currents of the ocean meet in a spinning swirl, the Pacific
Gyre Garbage Patch is a soup of trash that has floated from all corners of the globe.
The inability to «gaze into the abyss»
where these bellmouth spillways are concerned reminds me of the infinite regress of barbershop mirrors:
where two mirrors face each other, the bottom of the
gyre always slips frustratingly out of sight to one side or another, suggesting depths that are beyond us.