1. Efficient Atmospheric Transport of Microplastics over Asia and Adjacent Oceans.
- Author
-
Long X, Fu TM, Yang X, Tang Y, Zheng Y, Zhu L, Shen H, Ye J, Wang C, Wang T, and Li B
- Subjects
- Asia, Environmental Monitoring, Indian Ocean, Plastics, Microplastics, Water Pollutants, Chemical analysis
- Abstract
We developed a regional atmospheric transport model for microplastics (MPs, 10 μm to 5 mm in size) over Asia and the adjacent Pacific and Indian oceans, accounting for MPs' size- and shape-dependent aerodynamics. The model was driven by tuned atmospheric emissions of MPs from the land and the ocean, and the simulations were evaluated against coastal ( n = 19) and marine ( n = 56) observations. Our tuned atmospheric emissions of MPs from Asia and the adjacent oceans were 310 Gg y
-1 (1 Gg = 1 kton) and 60 Gg y-1 , respectively. MP lines and fragments may be transported in the atmosphere >1000 km; MP pellets in our model mostly deposited near-source. We estimated that 1.4% of the MP mass emitted into the Asian atmosphere deposited into the oceans via atmospheric transport; the rest deposited over land. The resulting net atmospheric transported MP flux from Asia into the oceans was 3.9 Gg y-1 , twice as large as a previous estimate for the riverine-transported MP flux from Asia into the oceans. The uncertainty of our simulated atmospheric MP budget was between factors of 3 and 7. Our work highlighted the impacts of the size and morphology on the aerodynamics of MPs and the importance of atmospheric transport in the source-to-sink relationship of global MP pollution.- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF