Ted Reckas
We hear about immense amounts of plastic swirling around the planet’s oceans in gyres, but what are they?

We've talked about the problem with trash entering the ocean on a massive scale, how it gets caught up in ocean currents, carried all over the globe, and harms marine life. The trash has collected in five major gyres around the world, forming a toxic soup that is truly immense. The world's gyres hold 73.9 million pounds of plastic, according to a 2011 Columbia University study.

Gyres are basically giant, circular complexes of ocean currents driven by the coriolis effect (the rotation of the earth causing moving things to skew right in the northern hemisphere and left in the southern hemisphere). A piece of trash drifting with the currents will likely end up swirling toward a gyre if it floats long enough — sometimes the trip can take over 10 years — and over time these areas have become concentrated with the world's trash. Yoiu think the dump in your home town is bad? The world's dump is in the middle of the ocean.

The experts at 5 Gyres have sailed to the world's gyres to explore them and do research on the amount of garbage there. 

Here they tell us about gyres.