The North Pacific Gyre is the ocean current vortex responsible for transporting huge amounts of pollution into the ocean from the land alond the Pacific coastline.
In this Greenpeace animation, we can see how trash moves around the Pacific over a 6-year period, eventually accumulating as the Pacific’s ‘trash carpet’.
It’s also worth noting that this so-called ‘trash carpet’ is estimated to now be the size of Texas, and in these areas the surface water contains six times more plastic that plankton biomass.