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Description of the Resource

Title
All is not lost: deriving a top-down mass budget of plastic at sea
Title (original)
All is not lost: deriving a top-down mass budget of plastic at sea
Description
This work deals with the proposal of a tentative "whole ocean" mass balance model for ocean plastic that combines emission data, surface area-normalized plastic fragmentation rates, estimated concentrations in the OSL, and removal from the OSL by sinking, and the application of a systems engineering analytical approach . The authors simulate known plastic abundances in the OSL and calculate an average whole ocean apparent surface area-normalized plastic fragmentation rate constant, given representative radii for macroplastic and microplastic.
Authors
Albert A. Koelmans, Merel Kooi, Kara Lavender Law and Erik van Sebille
Publication year
2017
Resource type
Scientific publication
Language
English
Areas of knowledge
Modelling marine litter
Microplastics
Mapping of marine litter
Monitoring of marine litter
Number of links to resource
1
Other relevant information
Simulations show that 99.8% of the plastic that had entered the ocean since 1950 had settled below the OSL by 2016, with an additional 9.4 million tons settling per year. In 2016, the model predicts that of the 0.309 million tons in the OSL, an estimated 83.7% was macroplastic, 13.8% microplastic, and 2.5% was < 0.335 mm 'nanoplastic'. A zero future emission simulation shows that almost all plastic in the OSL would be removed within three years, implying a fast response time of surface plastic abundance to changes in inputs. The model complements current spatially explicit models, points to future experiments that would inform critical model parameters, and allows for further validation when more experimental and field data become available.

Links to resource (1)

Related Project (1)