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No missing sink
Summary
A reanalysis of ocean plastic data found that earlier estimates of the amount of microplastics entering the ocean from rivers were overestimated by a factor of two to three. This suggests the apparent 'missing sink' of ocean plastic may not exist, with more plastic than expected accumulating in coastal and shelf waters.
Plastic Pollution Estimates of the flux of microplastics from rivers, in the context of the mass of plastic that has been observed in the ocean, have made it appear that a large, unidentified sink of plastics must exist there. Weiss et al. show that there may not be a missing sink after all. By reformulating how mass fluxes are calculated from observations of particle numbers, they demonstrate that those mass fluxes were overestimated by two to three orders of magnitude. This explains why the residence time of plastics in the ocean seemed so puzzlingly short and implies that ocean plastics may persist and degrade over longer periods than previously thought. Science , abe0290, this issue p. [107][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abe0290