Plane Search Shows World's Oceans Are Full of Trash
Search for missing Malaysian plane shines spotlight on giant ocean garbage patches.
Before Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing, sea trash was not a global headliner.
"This is the first time the whole world is watching, and so it's a good time for people to understand that our oceans are garbage dumps," says Kathleen Dohan, a scientist at Earth and Space Research in Seattle, Washington, who maps ocean surface currents. "This is a problem in every ocean basin."
Dohan plotted the movement of debris in a time-lapse video that shows where objects dropped into the ocean will end up in ten years. The objects migrate to regions known as garbage patches. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have two patches each, north and south. The Indian Ocean's garbage patch is centered roughly halfway
