It's currently complicated

A few weeks ago I wrote about the problem of plastic in the ocean. In that post I used a simple graphic showing the location and direction of rotation of the five oceanic gyres. On seeing that diagram you may have guessed that things were actually a little more complicated. Well, they are. Something that might have tipped you off was the swirls in the photos of plankton blooms I posted, here and here. If you want to get a sense of just how complex the ocean currents are, here is a great visualisation of a NASA ocean current model. This too, is a simplification.