What Is It?

Check out these pictures and see if you can figure out what they show. It's like a Rorschach test for humanity.

Beautiful, yet also disturbing, no? 

If you haven't figure it out they are from a series of photos taken in the water column of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Read all about the photo series, and the artist behind them, here. 

What would it be like to swim down through the estimated 100 million tons of trash swirling around in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Mandy Barker's photographs bring viewers probably as close as they'd ever want to come to finding out.

Looking at the images in the U.K.-based artist's "SOUP" series creates the vertiginous feeling of sinking into the ocean, watching colorful -- but deadly -- bits of plastic in all shapes, sizes, and hues rise through the blackness of the deep sea.

"I have always been interested in collecting natural objects from the beach but began to notice that there was more and more man-made materials debris amongst them," Barker told TreeHugger in an email this week. In an earlier series, "Indefinite," she photographed individual pieces or clusters of beach trash, abstracted to resemble the strange sea creatures such debris is threatening, with captions indicating the number of years it takes each material to decompose.

Oh, and they were inspired by this provocative and groundbreaking series.