Tutorial Background Information
This tutorial is on modelling the movement of plastics in the world's oceans. Plastic pollution in the ocean is a major problem, affecting the entire ocean ecosystem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a fairly well-known example of the heart-breaking effects of humanity's inability to manage our own waste. However, there is much less widespread awareness of the fact that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually just the largest of five major garbage patches in the world's oceans - the extent of the problem is truly massive.
Solving this global problem will require major changes to the way humanity approaches packaging and waste management. A clean-up effort is also required to try to undo the damage we have already done (as much as possible, since microplastics are potentially impossible to remove from the earths oceans). This is what The Ocean Cleanup are working to do.
In order to inform their clean-up strategy, The Ocean Cleanup simulates the motion of plastics in the world's oceans. Their website has a blog written by one of their computational modelers describing the basic idea of how they do this. The tutorial here gives you an interactive opportunity to learn to carry out such simulations in Python code.
Prerequisite Knowledge for the Tutorial
The coder's version of the tutorial below assumes you know how to code using Python and that you have some familiarity with numerical integration of differential equations and basic vector calculus.Â
There is a Python coding page on this website with a list of resources to help you learn to code. If you don't know about numerical integration but would like to give the coder's tutorial a go, reading this page written by Professor Drew Baden from University of Maryland should set you up with the required understanding of the technique. If you are unfamiliar with vector calculus it will probably take a bit longer to get up to speed, but I would recommend Khan Academy as a resource for learning maths in your own time.
If you don't have any of the prerequisite knowledge for the tutorial, don't worry, the non-coder's version shows you the same principles in action using less technical explanations and it doesn't require you to write any code.
The Tutorial
These buttons will open a Google Colab notebook which constitutes the tutorial: