There's a common saying that "Everything's Bigger in Texas!", but hardly anyone ever mentions the size of the Lone Star State in relation to other massive objects. Cue the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a colossal hunk of floating trash found near the midpoint between California and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

In a new study published Thursday, the drifting island of waste has been found to have grown to more than 600,000 square miles. Want a visual? That's twice the size of Texas .

An early 1990s discovery, the cluster's trash is an accumulation from countries around the Pacific Rim, including North and South America , study lead author Laurent Lebreton told USA Today.

An oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation , Lebreton said winds and intersection ocean currents drive all that trash into one location. The OCF is a non-profit organization that led the charge behind research cited in the recently published study.

The monstrous patch consists of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and weighs a whopping 88,000 tons. Again, a visual? That's equal to 500 jumbo jets. These new numbers are up to 16 times higher than what previous estimates anticipated, and it's rapidly getting worse.

(MORE: Infamous USS Juneau Sunken During World War II Discovered in the South Pacific )

"We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered ,” Dr. Julia Reisser, also of the OCF, said in a press release. “We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris."

It took the efforts of an international team of OCF scientists, half a dozen universities and an aerial sensor company three years to accurately map out the patch's sheer size and density.

In addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there are four other known trash collections adrift in the ocean. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest of the five, according to Lebreton.

The patches are in international waters, meaning no governments are held responsible for stepping in to clean up the islands of waste. The bulk of the effort has to be taken on by groups like OCF, most of which are privately funded.

And the longer they wait, the more of an enemy time becomes. Joost Dubois, a spokesman with OCF, said there's a sense of urgency with these cleanups. The faster they can be conducted, the larger the parcels of trash are. As time goes on, the garbage will begin to break down into tiny pieces.

"It's a ticking time bomb of larger material," Dubois said. "We've got to get it before it breaks down into a size that's too small to collect and also dangerous for marine life."

Scientists at the European Space Agency are working on technology to allow them to not only identify the accumulation of marine trash, but also use measurements to provide real data on the seriousness of the issue.

"We're not talking about actually spotting floating litter items , but instead to identify a distinct spectral signature of plastic picked up from orbit," the ESA's Paolo Corradi told Engadget.com.

"Monitoring is not a goal in itself, but a means to show the scale of the problem, and start to try and solve it," Corradi added.

With plastic only coming into the environmental picture in the 1950s, there's really no way of knowing how long it will linger in the ocean. It's feared the plastic could endure decades, centuries or even longer in the ocean if left alone.

"How long plastic may remain in the ocean is a big unknown, but unless we begin to remove it, some would say it may remain there forever," Lebreton said.