One of the persisting problems that threaten marine life is the virtually endless marine litter floating in the ocean - and a new tracking tool could help monitor where this debris comes from and where they are headed.
This problem prompted researchers from Florida State University (FSU) to develop their new tracking tool, with its development and testing detailed in the report "Tracking Marine Litter With a Global Ocean Model: Where Does It Go? Where Does It Come From?" appearing in this month's Frontiers in Marine Science. With this new model, researchers hope to help find answers in monitoring and eventually addressing the problem of marine litter worldwide.
JIMBARAN, BALI, INDONESIA - JANUARY 30: Cigarette gas lighters which were found washed ashore on Jimbaran Beach on January 30, 2021, in Jimbaran, Bali, Indonesia. About eight million metric tons of plastics are thrown into the ocean every year, according to studies published in scientific journals - by 2050; it is estimated that the weight of plastics in the oceans will exceed the weight of all marine life, and microplastics are already being ingested by fish and starting to appear in the human food chain.
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Understanding the Origin and Destination of Marine Litter
"Marine litter is found around the world, and we do not fully understand its impact on the ocean ecosystem or human health," said Eric Chassignet, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) at FSU, in a university news release. He explains that this stresses the importance of understanding this problem and developing ways to work against it.
Marine litter is mostly man-made waste materials finding their way through water that eventually empties into the ocean. Its most common threat is in animals getting tangled through various materials like discarded nets and plastic pack rings used in soda cans. Scientists in countless studies have also reported finding plastics - from entire bags and packaging to microplastics - inside fishes, turtles, and birds, with some of them proving fatal by blocking respiratory and digestive tracts and poisoning them, affecting their feeding and reproductive behaviors. Plastics now constitute the largest part of marine litter, mainly because they are non-biodegradable and stay in the waters for extremely long periods of time.
An easily visible testament to the volume of marine litter is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a large consolidation of waste materials in the North Pacific Ocean which a 2018 study says is rapidly accumulating over the past decades.
Since understanding where marine litter comes from is an important part of addressing this problem, the United Nations helped fund the new study that might help mitigate the harmful effects of mismanaged plastic waste and help guide policy and rulemaking.
"Knowing where the marine litter released into the ocean by a given country goes and the origin of the litter found on the coastline of a given country are important pieces of information for policymakers," Chassignet added.
Developing a Tracking Tool for the Ocean
Researchers in the study developed the tracking tool based on global data on mismanaged plastic waste data. The tool tracks marine debris by using information from the ocean and marine currents since 2010. In their published report, researchers report that the overall distribution of the modeled marine litter from the tracking tool "is in good agreement with the limited observations that we have at our disposal."
The FSU team also developed an interactive website, "World's Ocean Litter," which provides a "dynamic display of marine litter trajectories in the ocean" as well as relevant statistics on mismanaged waste materials generated by each country. The animated world map shows the travel and accumulation of marine litter, color-coded by the territories of origin, starting in 2010.
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