Abstract
AbstractPlastic pollution is ubiquitous within the marine environment. Despite increasing public and scientific attention to the issue, there still remain gaps in the knowledge of the full global extent of the distribution of this microplastic pollution. The presence and transportation of microplastics in sea ice is an emerging area of research, particularly with regards to sea ice in the Southern Ocean. This study uses numerical modeling to explore the accumulation and transport of positively and neutrally buoyant microplastics in both Arctic and Southern Ocean sea ice. In general, sea ice may be an important seasonal sink for microplastics pollution in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Positively buoyant microplastics dominate in Arctic sea ice, whereas in the Southern Ocean, neutrally buoyant plastics, which arrive in the region through deep‐water transport, appear to be dominant. The overall distribution of microplastics in the Arctic is in keeping with the current literature, although direct comparisons between the results of this model and observational data should be made with caution. There is a clear need for further observational data in the Southern Ocean to elucidate both the transport mechanisms and accumulation of microplastics in Southern Ocean sea ice.
Highlights
Marine plastic pollution was first documented in the 1970s but has gained attention and popularity both within the scientific community and with the general public over the past decade
We begin by briefly presenting the global distributions of each of the plastic types, further details of which can be found in Mountford and Morales Maqueda (2019) albeit at lower resolution
The inflow into the Arctic, following the Norwegian coastline, leads us to focus on the accumulation of buoyant plastics in Arctic sea ice for the present study
Summary
Marine plastic pollution was first documented in the 1970s but has gained attention and popularity both within the scientific community and with the general public over the past decade. Floating marine plastic pollution is estimated at around 250,000 tonnes, this is thought to only reflect around 1% of the total amount of plastic that has entered the marine environment over the past 60–70 years and much of the “missing” plastic may be within the water column and within marine sediments (Mountford & Morales Maqueda, 2019; van Sebille et al, 2020) Both empirical data and the use of numerical modeling have shown that plastics have pervaded remote regions of the world’s oceans, from deep sea sediments (Courtene-Jones et al, 2020; Peng et al, 2020) to remote islands (Lavers & Bond, 2017) and both poles (Lusher et al, 2015; Waller et al, 2017).
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