Abstract
Mass estimates of plastic pollution in the Great Lakes based on surface samples differ by orders of magnitude from what is predicted by production and input rates. It has been theorized that a potential location of this missing plastic is on beaches and in nearshore water. We incorporate a terrain dependent beaching model to an existing hydrodynamic model for Lake Erie which includes three dimensional advection, turbulent mixing, density driven sinking, and deposition into the sediment. When examining parameter choices, in all simulations the majority of plastic in the lake is beached, potentially identifying a reservoir holding a large percentage of the lake’s plastic which in previous studies has not been taken into account. The absolute amount of beached plastic is dependent on the parameter choices. We also find beached plastic does not accumulate homogeneously through the lake, with eastern regions of the lake, especially those downstream of population centers, most likely to be impacted. This effort constitutes a step towards identifying sinks of missing plastic in large bodies of water.
Highlights
Plastic is a ubiquitous source of pollution in various ecological compartments of the world’s oceans and lakes
The three choices of 1 day, 2 days, and 5 days for the parameter Tb in the no beach type dependence (NBD) model had a significant effect on the number of beached particles (Fig. 2)
It has recently been proposed that nearshore beaching plastic is the predominant location of this missing plastic [11, 54,55,56,57]
Summary
Plastic is a ubiquitous source of pollution in various ecological compartments of the world’s oceans and lakes. Mass estimates of surface plastic based on sampling efforts are orders of magnitude lower than what is predicted by input estimates [3]. Locations of this missing plastic have been proposed, such as suspended deeper in the water column, trapped in the sediment, or that it is filtered out by rivers and does not make it to large bodies of water [4,5,6,7,8].
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