Project3_Gabbi

• Text 

• Egger, M., Nijhof, R., Quiros, L., Leone, G., Royer, S., McWhirter, A. C., Kantakov, G. A., Radchenko, V. I., Pakhomov, E. A., Hunt, B. P. V., & Lebreton, L. (2020). A spatially variable scarcity of floating microplastics in the eastern north pacific ocean. Environmental Research Letters, 15(11), 114056, 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abbb4f

Each year, several million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste are estimated to enter the ocean from coastal environments (Jambeck et al 2015, Lebreton et al 2017, Schmidt et al 2017). 

The long-term risks of ocean plastic pollution for marine ecosystems, fisheries and human health, however, remain largely unknown. Plastic objects discarded into the ocean either sink or float depending on their respective buoyancy. 

Roughly two third of the plastics produced annually consist of polymer types with a density lower than seawater (Geyer et al 2017) and hence initiate their journey floating at the surface of the ocean. 

The fate and transport of these positively buoyant plastic objects in the marine environment is highly influenced by oceanic currents, waves and wind (Van Sebille et al 2020). 

Beaching in coastal environments removes part of the floating debris from the sea surface relatively quickly after these objects have entered the ocean (Lebreton et al 2019, Olivelli et al 2020, Ryan 2020). 

The remaining floating plastic objects with a high buoyancy and durability such as thick polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP), escape the coastal environment and are transported into the open ocean (Ryan 2015, Lebreton et al 2018). 

These plastic objects eventually accumulate at the sea surface of subtropical oceanic gyres where concentrations of floating plastic debris can exceed one million pieces per km2 for fragments >500 µm and hundreds of kilograms per km2 (Cozar ´ et al 2014, Eriksen et al 2014, Law et al 2014, van Sebille et al 2015, Lebreton et al 2018). 

Due to the large amounts of floating plastic debris present in their surface waters, the subtropical oceanic gyres have become known as ocean garbage patches.

Plastic waste accumulating in the global ocean is an increasingly threatening environmental issue. To date, the floating and thus most visible fraction of ocean plastic pollution has been mapped at global scale.

Our results reveal that the apparent microplastic scarcity is not uniformly distributed across the region.

Instead, we show that the relative abundance of floating microplastics increases from the outside to the inside of the North Pacific Garbage Patch.

The results presented here highlight that global estimates of the accumulation and removal of positively buoyant microplastics need to consider spatial aspects such as variations in ocean productivity, the dominant physical transport processes in a given area, as well as the time needed for a plastic object to reach the specific offshore location.

Song

Great Gig in the Sky - Pink Floyd

Project

For this project I utilized the key framing tool to change rotation, opacity and position of text and shapes throughout the video in order to mimic the behavior of waves of tide.