To Clarify: Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Gyres

In news stories about the bath toys lost at sea, or about the so-called garbage patch, one occasionally encounters some confusion about oceanic gyres--altogether understandable confusion because the ocean is a strange place and its currents are complicated, chaotic even. The general as opposed to oceanographic sense of "gyre" is the sense in which Yeats famously used it in "The Second Coming"--

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

--a circular or spiraling motion or form. The oceanographic sense of the word "gyre" is narrower. In oceanography, a gyre is a circuit of major currents. Or to be a bit eye-crossingly precise about it, you'd say a gyre is a circuit of major wind-driven surface currents that orbit the ocean basins. The Gulf Stream, for instance, is a major surface current and it describes one arc of a gyre--the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, which, simplified by cartographers at NASA, looks like this:

A gyre is not a "garbage patch." Nor is a gyre by definition a current that collects floating debris. That said, there are currents in the five largest gyres--the subtropical gyres, which include the North Atlantic one pictured above--that do have the tendency to collect floating debris. Such currents create what oceanographers call "convergence zones." Convergence zones lie within gyres, but they are not the same thing as gyres. The most famous one is--take a breath--the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. You can see why people tend to prefer the somewhat misleading yet far catchier term "garbage patch." Here, on the map that appears at the front of Moby-Duck, is the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone:

Where will the tsunami wreckage go?

I was recently asked that question at a talk I gave. The University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center answered it by animating the likely drift route of the debris carried out to sea by the tsunami that struck Japan last March. You can watch the animation here. Or click on the low-res movie below.

 Here's how the IPRC captions the animation:

The So-Called Garbage Patch, Post 1

I get a lot of questions about the so-called Garbage Patch. Here are some answers. In the summer of 2005, when I began my researches into the castaway toys, I'd never heard of the Garbage Patch. Nor, I suspect, had most people. Since then the phenomenon has gone through the familiar life-cycles of a news story. First came the sensationalism. Then the story began to smell of Old News. Then came the debunking. By now, the Garbage Patch is rumored to be a myth. It isn't, though the name is misleading and a portion of fancy has muddled the facts. That's usually how it goes with storytelling, journalistic or otherwise, especially when it comes to the sea. (Melville: "In maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.")