You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Trash as far as the eye can see, garbage, floating for miles in the ocean.

It's an image you've probably seen pictures of,

a fix to an article about ocean pollution or climate change

that's an image most people turn away from,

but not marine biologist Fiona Chong.

A garbage patch is a floating collection of plastic debris

that came from land,

but has ended up in the oceans.

And the plastic debris and the trash is carried there from land

into the oceans by wind and ocean currents

and they kind of congregate there and they swell around.

Fiona has stared into the soul of oceanic garbage more than most people

as a PhD student at the University of Hall in the UK.

Now garbage patches circulate around five different ocean gires

or huge rotating currents,

think water going around in a bathtub drain,

except of course the water never drains.

There's one in the Indian Ocean, two in the Atlantic Ocean

and two in the Pacific Ocean.

It's like a floating soup,

made up of fishing nets, garbage and peppered with microplastics.

...