World map with major marine currents. (Image credit: Rainer Lesniewski via Shutterstock) Winds, powered by solar energy, direct surface currents, like those in gyres.

Plastic pollution tends to float near the surface and build up in large, rotating ocean currents known as gyres. The ...

Enormous, swirling gyres compose some of the world’s biggest and most important ocean currents. Found in the North and South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, these ...

The ocean churns up various types of currents, and together, these larger and more permanent currents make up the systems of currents known as gyres. CREDIT: NOAA.

Much may have been made of the highly publicised Pacific Patch, but it is only one of the gyres, or circulating ocean currents, which moves around the world's oceans in a never-ending circle.

Historically, the ocean has been difficult to model. Scientists struggled in years past to simulate ocean currents or accurately predict fluctuations in temperature, salinity, and other properties.

The same ocean currents that concentrate plastic waste at oceanic gyres may be vital to the life cycles of floating marine organisms, by bringing them together to feed and mate, the authors say.

The Coriolis force, and how it changes with latitude, is what sets up the ocean gyre circulation. When looking at the gyre circulation in individual ocean basins, we observe a strong poleward current ...

A groundbreaking discovery reveals that the Southern Ocean is undergoing an unprecedented reversal in circulation. Read on to ...

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Sargasso Sea are both oceanic gyres — marine zones where multiple ocean currents converge to form a vortex (though the Sargasso Sea is known for its ...

An ocean of gyres. The surface flow in the North Atlantic consists of three large gyres. Far south, in the subtropical gyre, the water follows the Gulf Stream northward in a narrow, concentrated band.