Story highlights A massive pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean is growing

Last fall, environmentalists asked the United Nations to declare it a country

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was first discovered in 1997

(CNN) A huge, swirling pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean is growing faster than expected and is now three times the size of France.

According to a three-year study published in Scientific Reports Friday, the mass known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is about 1.6 million square kilometers in size -- up to 16 times bigger than previous estimates. That makes it more than double the size of Texas.

Ghost nets, or discarded fishing nets, make up almost half the 80,000 metric tons of garbage floating at sea, and researchers believe that around 20% of the total volume of trash is debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

The study -- conducted by an international team of scientists with The Ocean Cleanup Foundation , six universities and an aerial sensor company -- utilized two aircraft surveys and 30 vessels to cross the debris field.

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Along with nets to survey and collect trash, researchers used two six-meter-wide devices to measure medium to large-sized objects. An aircraft was also fitted with advanced sensors to collect 3D scans of the ocean garbage. They ended up collecting a total of 1.2 million plastic samples and scanned more than 300 square kilometers of ocean surface.

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