The experts estimated about 70% of litter that ends up in the world's oceans, sinks to the bottom. The rest of the marine debris remains floating under the ocean surface and is carried around by the ocean currents. The floating debris mainly contains undegradable tiny plastic particles that can mix with larger items, such as fishing gear or shoes, and concentrates in parts of the ocean, gradually forming the so-called garbage patches, or marine trash vortices.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is the largest collection of marine debris in the world. It spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. Two other areas of high trash concentration are the garbage patches in the Atlantic and Indian ocean.
Greg Shirah and Horace Mitchell have published their garbage patch visualization experiment results online on August 10, 2015, in the NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Their animations were also presented on the SIGGRAPH 2015 conference.
