WEBVTT FILE

1
00:00:00.020 --> 00:00:04.210
Hi, it’s Greg Shirah from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

2
00:00:04.210 --> 00:00:08.400
We wanted to see if we could visualize the so-called ocean

3
00:00:08.400 --> 00:00:12.580
garbage patches. We start with data from floating, scientific buoys that

4
00:00:12.580 --> 00:00:16.770
NOAA has been distributing in the oceans for the last 35-years

5
00:00:16.770 --> 00:00:20.950
represented here as white dots. Let's speed up time to see where the buoys go...

6
00:00:20.950 --> 00:00:25.130
Since new buoys are

7
00:00:25.130 --> 00:00:29.310
continually released, it's hard to tell where older buoys move to. Let's clear the map

8
00:00:29.310 --> 00:00:33.480
and add the starting locations of all the buoys… Interesting patterns appear all

9
00:00:33.480 --> 00:00:37.660
over the place. Lines of buoys are due to ships and planes that released

10
00:00:37.660 --> 00:00:41.850
buoys periodically.If we let all of the buoys go

11
00:00:41.850 --> 00:00:46.060
at the same time, we can observe buoy migration patterns. The number of buoys

12
00:00:46.060 --> 00:00:50.230
decreases because some buoys don't last as long as others. The buoys

13
00:00:50.230 --> 00:00:54.430
migrate to 5 known gyres also called ocean garbage patches.

14
00:00:54.430 --> 00:00:58.610


15
00:00:58.610 --> 00:01:02.800
We can also see this in a computational model of

16
00:01:02.800 --> 00:01:07.010
ocean currents called ECCO-2.We release particles evenly around the world

17
00:01:07.010 --> 00:01:11.220
and let the modeled currents carry the particles. The particles from the model

18
00:01:11.220 --> 00:01:15.400
also migrate to the garbage patches.

19
00:01:15.400 --> 00:01:19.580
Even though the retimed buoys and

20
00:01:19.580 --> 00:01:23.770
modeled particles did not react to currents at the same times, the fact that the data

21
00:01:23.770 --> 00:01:27.970
tend to accumulate in the same regions show how robust the result is.

22
00:01:27.970 --> 00:01:28.989