US EditionOcean Plastic Could Linger a Century Even if Pollution Stops
New study reveals 10% of buoyant ocean plastics remain after 100 years due to slow fragmentation and sinking processes, highlighting long-term pollution challenges.
- On October 20, 2025, Stanford researcher Dr. Matt Savoca and his team are collecting seawater and using delicate mesh filters to separate microplastics by hand, tracing pollution from source to sea.
- In 2025, scientists from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Queen Mary University of London published a model showing buoyant plastic could persist over 100 years due to slow fragmentation and marine snow attachment.
- Nan Wu's model shows microplastics less than 100 µm reach the ocean bottom through multiple aggregation and settling cycles of over 400,000,000 meters, with only particles under 100 µm able to settle fully.
- The study helps explain the 'missing plastic' problem by showing slow fragmentation sinks buoyant plastic, and it warns rising microplastics could overwhelm the biological pump and disrupt ocean biogeochemical cycles.
- Roughly 170 trillion plastic particles weighing 2.3 million metric tons circulate the ocean surface, and researchers warn people who consume seafood may ingest elevated microplastic levels.
10 Articles
10 Articles
Plastic pollution could linger at ocean surfaces for over a century, new research finds
Scientists from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Queen Mary University of London have developed a simple model to show how buoyant plastic can settle through the water column and they predict it could take over 100 years to remove plastic waste from the ocean's surface.
Stanford teams tracking the path of microplastics from source to sea
The team uses seawater and delicate mesh filters to painstakingly separate the buoyant plastic by hand. The goal is to understand where the samples are originating, and how they're being carried from their source to the sea.
Marine snow as vectors for microplastic transport: Multiple aggregation cycles account for the settling of buoyant microplastics to deep-sea sediments
Many studies have reported the paradoxical observation of high concentrations of low-density microplastics (plastic particles < 5 mm) in deep-sea sediments despite their buoyancy. The incorporation of buoyant microplastics into marine snow has been observed to enhance microplastic settling. Previous studies on the vertical movement of buoyant microplastics have been unable to theoretically account for these ocean observations and no study has com
Scientists from the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Queen Mary University in London have developed a simple model to show how floating plastic can settle in the water column and predict that it may take more than 100 years to remove plastic waste from the ocean surface. Published [...]
New Study Reveals Plastic Pollution Can Persist on Ocean Surfaces for Over
Scientists have long grappled with the perplexing mystery of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, where the sheer volume of buoyant plastic waste on the surface does not tally with the amounts observed. A groundbreaking new study from Queen Mary University of London, published in Philosophical Transactions of the
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