It’s not really an island though. There’s just more garbage there than elsewhere.
Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/yd3)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area.
Neat. Reminds me of bitmagnet, which crawls BitTorrent’s DHT to built a searchable index of torrents. It lacks a peer option though.
I ran it for an hour and calculated that it would use over 1TB/month of bandwidth, which is too much for my data cap :(