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Flotsam can be blown by the wind, or follow the flow of ocean currents, often ending up in the middle of oceanic gyres where currents are weakest. Within garbage patches, the waste is not compact, and although most of it is near the surface of the ocean, it can be found up to more than 30 metres (100 ft) deep in the water. [127]
A gyre is a circular ocean current formed by the Earth's wind patterns and the forces created by the rotation of the planet. [33] There are five main ocean gyres: the North and South Pacific Subtropical Gyres, the North and South Atlantic Subtropical Gyres, and the Indian Ocean Subtropical Gyre. There are significant garbage patches in each of ...
While marine pollution can be obvious, as with the marine debris shown above, it is often the pollutants that cannot be seen that cause most harm.. Marine pollution occurs when substances used or spread by humans, such as industrial, agricultural and residential waste, particles, noise, excess carbon dioxide or invasive organisms enter the ocean and cause harmful effects there.
Contributing between 1 and 10% of total ocean primary productivity, 200 species of coccolithophores live in the ocean, and under the right conditions they can form large blooms. These large bloom formations are a driving force for the export of calcium carbonate from the surface to the deep ocean in what is sometimes called “Coccolith rain”.
The ocean is a global common, so negative externalities of marine debris are not usually experienced by the producer. In the 1950s, the importance of government intervention with marine pollution protocol was recognized at the First Conference on the Law of the Sea. [77] Ocean dumping is controlled by international law, including:
Winds drive ocean currents in the upper 100 meters of the ocean's surface. However, ocean currents also flow thousands of meters below the surface. These deep-ocean currents are driven by differences in the water's density, which is controlled by temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline). This process is known as thermohaline circulation.
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In the context of ocean currents, a volume of one million cubic meters may be imagined as a "slice" of ocean with dimensions 1 km × 1 km × 1 m (width × length × thickness). At this scale, these units can be more easily compared in terms of width of the current (several km), depth (hundreds of meters), and current speed (as meters per second ).