Plastic waste has been documented in nearly all types of marine environments and has been found in species spanning all levels of marine food webs. Within these marine environments, deep pelagic waters encompass the largest ecosystems on Earth. We lack a comprehensive understanding of the concentrations, cycling, and fate of plastic waste in sub-surface waters, constraining our ability to implement effective, large-scale policy and conservation strategies. We used remotely operated vehicles and engineered purpose-built samplers to collect and examine the distribution of microplastics in the Monterey Bay pelagic ecosystem at water column depths ranging from 5 to 1000 m. Laser Raman spectroscopy was used to identify microplastic particles collected from throughout the deep pelagic water column, with the highest concentrations present at depths between 200 and 600 m. Examination of two abundant particle feeders in this ecosystem, pelagic red crabs ( Pleuroncodes planipes ) and giant larvaceans ( Bathochordaeus stygius ), showed that microplastic particles readily flow from the environment into coupled water column and seafloor food webs. Our findings suggest that one of the largest and currently underappreciated reservoirs of marine microplastics may be contained within the water column and animal communities of the deep sea.

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The conventional long-wave equations for waves propagating over fluid of variable depth depend for their formal derivation on a Taylor series expansion of the velocity potential about the bottom. The expansion, however, is not possible if the depth is not an analytic function of the horizontal co-ordinates and it is a necessary condition for its rapid convergence that the depth is also slowly varying. We show that if in the case of two-dimensional motions the undisturbed fluid is first mapped conformally onto a uniform strip, before the Taylor expansion is made, the analytic condition is removed and the approximations implied in the lowest-order equations are much improved.In the limit of infinitesimal waves of very long period, consideration of the form of the error suggests that by modifying the coefficients of the reformulated equation we may find an equation exact for arbitrary depth profiles. We are thus able to calculate the reflexion coefficients for long-period waves incident on a step change in depth and a half-depth barrier. The forms of the coefficients of the exact equation are not simple; however, for these particular cases, comparison with the coefficients of the reformulated long-wave equation suggests that in most cases the latter may be adequate. This opens up the possibility of beginning to study finite amplitude and frequency effects on regions of rapidly varying depth.

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