Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans (2007-2013)
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we report an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world’s oceans from 24 expeditions (2007–2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, coastal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N5680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N5891). Using an oceanographic model of floating debris dispersal calibrated by our data, and correcting for wind-driven vertical mixing, we estimate a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons. When comparing between four size classes, two microplastic <4.75 mm and meso- and macroplastic >4.75 mm, a tremendous loss of microplastics is observed from the sea surface compared to expected rates of fragmentation, suggesting there are mechanisms at play that remove <4.75 mm plastic particles from the ocean surface.
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2015-01-01T00:00:00
- Date (Publication)
- 2016-03-04T00:00:00
- Other citation details
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Eriksen M, Lebreton LCM, Carson HS, Thiel M, Moore CJ, et al. (2014) Plastic Pollution in
the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea. PLoS ONE 9(12): e111913. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111913
- Credit
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National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub
- Point of contact
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Role Organisation Electronic mail address Author Five Gyres Institute
- Topic category
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- Environment
- Oceans
Extent
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- Maintenance and update frequency
- Not planned
Resource format
- Title
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*.xml
- GCMD Science Keywords 5.3.8
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Oceans | Water Quality | Ocean Contaminants
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Resource constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
Resource constraints
- Title
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Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia
- Other constraints
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Data was sourced from the NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub - The Marine Biodiversity Hub is supported through funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program (NESP), administered by the Department of the Environment (DOE).
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Resource lineage
- Statement
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The data was provided by Laurent Lebreton and full methods are described in the cited paper (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111913). The source data are available at figshare.com. Eriksen, Marcus; Reisser, Julia; Galgani, Francois; Moore, Charles; Ryan, Peter; Carson, Hank; Thiel, Martin (2014): Plastic Marine Pollution Global Dataset. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1015289
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
Reference System Information
- Reference system identifier
- EPSG/WGS 84 (EPSG:4326)
Metadata constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
- DA83B0E3-2B75-48A2-8FDD-874EDD9DBDBF
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
- Contact
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Role Organisation Electronic mail address Point of contact CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere - Hobart
Type of resource
- Resource type
- Dataset
- Date info (Creation)
- 2016-03-04T00:00:00
- Date info (Revision)
- 2018-10-08T15:43:54
Metadata standard
- Title
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ISO 19115-3:2018
- Title
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Marine Community Profile
- Date (Creation)
- 2019-05-30
- Edition
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3.0
- Edition date
- 2019-05-30T00:00:00
- Cited responsible party
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Role Organisation Electronic mail address Custodian Marine Community Profile Governance Committee
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