MEXICO: The Ocean is filled with eight million tonnes of garbage – enough to fill five carrier bags for every foot of coastline on the planet.
Carried by sea currents, this waste congregates into five giant ‘garbage islands’ that swirl around the world’s major ocean gyres.
Now, Nasa has created a visualisation of this pollution highlighting the extend to which humanity is ruining the oceans with waste.
The space agency created the time-lapse using data from floating, scientific buoys that had been distributed in the oceans for the last 35 years.
‘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.
‘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.’Around 8 million tons of plastic bottles, bags, toys and other plastic rubbish ends up in the world’s oceans each year, scientists claim.
Because of the difficulties in working out the exact amount, since much of it may have sunk, the scientists said the true figure could be as much as 12.7 million tons polluting the ocean each year.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
