NASA Satellite Data Tracks Microplastics With Nearly 8 Million Tons Flowing From Rivers to Oceans Annually

Scientists from NASA recently released a shocking animation that shows the movement of microplastics in the oceans worldwide. They used the American space agency's satellite data to track its movements and revealed a high concentration of microplastics in the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, and the west coast of America, Mail Online reported.

Ocean currents transport plastics that fell from rivers or were engulfed by tides at beaches and further broken down into microplastics by waves and sunlight. Marine animals end up mistaking them for food and getting poisoned.

Alarming Video Shows Movement of Microplastics in Oceans

NASA has presented the effects of using plastics in everyday life in a tweet last week, revealing how the concentration of microplastics increases and moves in oceans worldwide.

News18 reported that the 40-second long animation traced the movements of microplastics from April 2, 2017, to September 25, 2018. NASA's Earth Observatory featured the graphic last Friday, December 3, as their picture of the day.

In a statement along with the graphic, they said that it reveals the seasonal variations in microplastic concentration. They noticed that it is greater during the summer and lesser in winter, perhaps due to more vertical mixing of ocean waters when the temperature is lower.

Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission principal investigator Chris Ruf and research assistant Madeline Evans from the University of Michigan created the graphic, which is considered the first time the journey of microplastics is mapped over a large scale daily.

Furthermore, the graphic informs that nearly 8 million tons of plastics around the world flow from rivers and beaches into the ocean every year. Much of the microplastics are collected in the calm centers of the ocean, making floating garbage patches, such as the well-known Great Pacific Garbage Patch located between California and Hawaii.

They published their findings on June 9, 2021, in IEEE Transactions of Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Marine debris or litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and rivers are collected in floating garbage patches, and the most famous of them is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Ocean.

According to National Geographic, the well-known floating patch is also called the Pacific trash vortex that spans from the waters of North America to Japan. It is a combination of the Western Garbage Patch near Japan and the Eastern Pacific Patch near California and Hawaii.

The North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, where warm water from South Pacific meets with cooler water from the Arctic and is located a few kilometers from Hawaii, linked the two floating garbage patches together. It serves as a highway that allows marine debris to move from one patch to another.

Most of the marine debris accumulated in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is non-biodegradable, especially plastics that are only further broken down into microplastics that are not always seen by the naked eye. Oceanographers and ecologists discovered that 70% of the marine debris in the patch sinks to the bottom of the ocean, creating an underwater trash heap.

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