How surface current circulation patterns help clean Great Pacific garbage patches

Between Hawaii and California, trash swirled with huge currents and got caught up in the infamous Texas-sized Great Pacific garbage patch. This is just one of many people found all over the world. While efforts to clear patches with the Sweeing Net may be intentional, the financial and environmental costs of the fuel make them controversial.

A study published in Marine Science analyzes the surface currents observed from satellites to identify attractive objects floating in large garbage patches nearby due to circulation patterns.

“This information allows the current to do the job. Instead of slowly burning fuel, instead of slowly burning fuel, the net can be stabilized in a place where the cleanup crew’s time, money and fuel-saving driftwood” he is the only co-author of a US-based paper.

Luka Kunz, a graduate student at the University of Hamburg, is the lead author.

“Sir Isaac Newton was the first to solve the orbital problem while trying to understand the object orbiting a gravity field. But he was thinking about the fact that the Earth would bring the Sun into orbit,” Duran said.

“For the next centuries, new tools and ideas were used to solve these types of highly complex problems, but it was not until the last decades that these tools fit the surface currents and winds.

To understand the various oceans, the researchers combined over 20 years of marine current satellite data, which records trajectories on ocean currents, with data collected by floating sensors called drifters.

From this data, they identified and categorized 3.5 million temporary attraction profiles, or regions that are areas that are plundered for short. Each vortex is in a range of 60-180 miles wide and can accumulate driftwood in areas larger than the city. These structures come and go, but are stable for an average of six days.

When the four vortices combine to a particular configuration, the most common and efficient traps form. When laid out in four quadrants, the counterclockwise rotating vortex will be in the upper right and lower left quadrants, while the clockwise rotating vortex will be in the upper left and upper right.

“This is almost 60% of cases,” Duran said. “These are the most stable and therefore are common.”

The researchers say that these structures tend to organize the way things move with flow and wind, so this task can be used in a variety of scenarios.

“The obvious example is searching and rescue of missing people,” Duran said. “Or a cargo ship loses its cargo. This can even be used for atmospheric data. If a volcano erupts or a wildfire occurs, the airport needs to know if it will redirect the flight.”

The research paper collaborated with the University of Hamburg and Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, to develop a technology to remove the world’s oceans from plastics.