The Great Pacific Garbage Patch From 1982 To 1998, Visualized

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of 160 million pounds of floating plastic trash situated between Hawaii and California, continues to grow. But how can we visualize the scale of this environmental problem?

Riley Brady, a a PhD student from the University of Colorado who studies ocean biogeochemistry, created a fascinating high-res ocean model simulation that he posted on Reddit which attempts to show how the submerged garbage travels over time. "The simulation shows 1,000,000 virtual particles dispersed throughout the global ocean, from the surface to deep to better understand fluid pathways in the ocean," Brady explained. "This is showing the fate of surface 'drifters' in the North Pacific, which collect in the famous 1.6 million square kilometer garbage patch. This was made using ParaView.

"Note that simulations like this take a long time to run," he added. "We ran 50 years of this climate model, with 10 kilometer grid cells in the ocean (quite high resolution for the community currently). To do so, we used 10,000 CPU cores on a supercomputer at Los Alamos National Lab and it took roughly 6 months of real world time to run." Watch the simulation below:

​[Via Reddit]