MdM SEMINAR SERIES - "Where’s all the plastic in our oceans? Simulating ocean transport to identify sources, fate and risks of marine litter", by Erik van Sebille, Utrecht University

MdM Seminar Series

Title: “Where’s all the plastic in our oceans? Simulating ocean transport to identify sources, fate and risks of marine litter”

Speaker: Erik van Sebille, Utrecht University

Date: Thursday, October 3rd 2019

Time: 12h

Venue: Room Z/033

Plastic is one of the best materials ever invented, but it doesn’t belong in the ocean. Large pieces can entangle turtles, birds, sharks, and other marine animals. Tiny bits of plastic, the result of the degrading actions of waves and Sun, can linger around for decades; once they get into the food chain, they too can adversely affect marine life. 

Many of us — scientists and concerned citizens alike — think that humankind should immediately do something about all this plastic in our ocean. But assessment of the effectiveness of plans and mitigation strategies will first require understanding how the plastic moves through the ocean.

Most of our understanding about plastic debris movement in the ocean comes from observations of drifting buoys or numerical simulations of passive virtual particles in ocean general circulation models. However, neither of those represent the fragmentation, sinking, beaching and other processes that affect the movement of real plastic items in the ocean. 

In order to fully simulate the sources, fate and risks of marine litter, it will be essential to simulate virtual particles that ‘behave’ like plastic. Such simulations are now being built, but the simulations will be most useful with sufficient observational data to constrain parameterisations for fragmentation, sinking and beaching. 

Here, I will show our latest global simulations of dispersion and accumulation of plastic though our oceans and how we constrain them to data. Focussing on regional examples in the North Pacific gyre, the Arctic and the Southern Ocean, I will show how the resulting maps of plastic distribution can be used to identify hotspots of risk to marine life.

Bio

Erik is an oceanographer and climate scientist, investigating the time scales and pathways of the global ocean circulation. His research focuses on how currents and eddies in the ocean transport heat, nutrients, marine organisms and plastics between different regions of the ocean. 

After receiving his PhD from Utrecht University, he went on to work in Miami (USA), Sydney (Australia) and London (UK). Since April 2017 he is back at Utrecht University. He currently holds a European Research Council Starting Grant to study the movement of plastic in the global ocean. He has been awarded a 2019 James B Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the 2016 Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the European Geosciences Union's Ocean Science Division, and is a member of De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Erik is a world-leading expert on the problem of plastic, with frequent appearances in the media. He has testified before UK parliament on the banning on micro-beads, is a member of a UN panel on the impacts of plastic pollution, and has advised the European Commission, the G7 and the Japanese government on the scope of the problem.