'Missing plastic' in the oceans can be found below the surface
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Julia Reisser, University of Western Australia; Charitha Pattiaratchi, University of Western Australia, and Maira Proietti, Fundação Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
The world’s ocean contains trillions of plastic fragments coming from packaging, fishing gear and other synthetic objects that break down at sea over time.
Most of what is known about these ocean plastics comes from surface net sampling, where the top 15cm of water is filtered to collect particles larger than 0.3mm.
Now we have published the first ever high-resolution depth profiles of ocean plastics in the journal Biogeosciences and data repository Figshare.
Most of the submerged plastics were very small – less than 1 mm across. Previous studies had noticed that tiny plastics were missing from the oceans.
We show that at least a fraction of this missing plastic is still adrift at sea, but at depths greater than the surface layer that is usually sampled by scientists.
A better characterisation of the vertical distribu...
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