Drifting ocean garbage, global simulation. This image shows the simulation 1900 days after the release of marker buoys and simulated rubbish in the model. The garbage has accumulated into patches (yellow). These are the five known gyres in the world's oceans, also known as ocean garbage patches. This model used data from floating scientific buoys (white dots), combined with a computational model of ocean currents called ECCO-2. Ocean buoy data came from the Global Drifter Database (1979 to 2013) maintained by NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. The results of the simulation were published in 2015.