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Effect of Biofouling on Microplastic Transport in a 3-D Global Eulerian Model
Summary
Scientists built a computer model showing that ocean germs growing on microplastic surfaces (a process called biofouling) cause larger plastic particles to sink hundreds of feet below the surface and spread out, rather than staying concentrated in the famous ocean "garbage patches." This matters because it means microplastics aren't just floating on top of the ocean where we can see and potentially clean them up—they're being carried deeper into marine ecosystems and food webs, which affects seafood safety and our understanding of where this pollution actually ends up.
Biofouling -- the occupation of microplastic (MP) surfaces by marine microbes -- alters particles' buoyancy and transport, yet its effect on the global distribution of MPs has not been well quantified. We present the first three-dimensional global Eulerian model to fully couple MP transport with biofouling, by augmenting the concentration field with an extra dimension representing the biomass attachment density on MP surfaces. This approach embeds time-dependent particle properties directly into the Eulerian concentration field, overcoming a fundamental challenge of tracking property evolution in grid-based models. Idealized simulations show that biofouling significantly reshapes the vertical distribution of MPs when two conditions are met: the particles must be sufficiently buoyant when they are clean to remain near the sea surface, and the local plankton growth rate must exceed the decay rate. In three-dimensional global simulations, biofouling substantially alters the distribution of large MPs ($\gtrsim 10$ $μ$m): biofouled particles are transported below the mixed layer to 500 m depth, and the subtropical surface garbage patches become more dispersed with reduced peak concentrations. This dispersion is due to a subsurface transport route, where biofouled particles sink into layers with reversed current and are carried outward from the gyre centers before regaining buoyancy. Small particles ($\lesssim 1$ $μ$m) remain unaffected as they stay effectively neutrally buoyant even when biofouled. A comparison with a global trawler dataset shows that incorporating biofouling reduces the fraction of outlying model-observation data points from 25\% to 13\%, demonstrating a meaningful improvement in model skill.