Does size and buoyancy affect the long-distance transport of floating debris?
By P. Ryan. 2015
233 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Floating persistent debris, primarily made from plastic, disperses long distances from source areas and accumulates in oceanic gyres. However, biofouling can increase the density of debris items to the point where they sink. Buoyancy is related to item volume, whereas fouling is related to surface area, so small items (which have high surface area to volume ratios) should start to sink sooner than large items. Empirical observations off South Africa support this prediction: moving offshore from coastal source areas there is an increase in the size of floating debris, an increase in the proportion of highly buoyant items (e.g. sealed bottles, floats and foamed plastics), and a decrease in the proportion of thin items such as plastic bags and flexible packaging which have high surface area to volume ratios. Size-specific sedimentation rates may be one reason for the apparent paucity of small plastic items floating in the world’s oceans.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e454ea56ab298aeb2687f167f6c1a2cec24f6c0f
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Ocean Engineering
In Pollution
Citations in the corpus
- Feasting on microplastics: ingestion by and effects on marine organisms (2018, background): “Therefore, zooplankton constitute an essential link between phytoplankton and large open-ocean animals (Sailley et al. 2015).”
- Effects of biofouling on the sinking behavior of microplastics (2017, background): “…et al 2015), and smaller objects with relatively higher surface area:volume ratio experience a more rapid relative change in specific density leading to their sinking (Chubarenko et al 2016, Fazey and Ryan 2016a, Ryan 2015), the small size of microplastic poses limits to the extent of biofouling.”