Micro(Nano)Plastics in the Atmosphere of the Atlantic Ocean

Caracci, Elisa; Vega-Herrera, Albert; Dachs, Jordi; Berrojalbiz, Naiara; Buonanno, Giorgio; Abad, Esteban; Llorca, Marta; Moreno, Teresa; Farré, Marinella

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4310067

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The oceans in particular accumulate enormous quantities of plastic from land, amounting to trillions of pieces (Eriksen et al, 2014(Eriksen et al, , 2023Jambeck et al, 2015). However, recent field studies sampling atmospheric microplastics have indicated that the ocean may be a source as well as a sink for plastics (S. Allen et al, 2020;Trainic et al, 2020;Ding et al, 2022;Caracci et al, 2022;Ferrero et al, 2022). It is well-known that particles in the oceans, such as bacteria, viruses, and sea salt, are carried into the air in great quantities via sea spray aerosols, which are generated from bursting ocean bubbles (Baylor et al, 1977;Blanchard & Syzdek, 1970;Lewis & Schwartz, 2004;Pendergraft et al, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the Concentration Enhancement and Selectivity of Plastic Particle Transport in Sea Spray Aerosols

Dubitsky,

Deane,

Stokes

et al. 2024

JGR Oceans

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Bursting bubbles transport bacteria, viruses, and other marine particles across the air‐sea interface. This effect is enhanced when particles are hydrophobic and cling to the bubbles as they rise. Recent studies suggest that plastic particles, a major ocean pollutant, can also be transported by sea spray. However, estimates of plastic transport via this pathway have large uncertainties due to limited size detection techniques in field studies and few lab studies. An understanding of the number and size of particles carried in the smallest drops, which have the longest residence time in the atmosphere, is missing from current literature. Here, we develop a modeling framework to provide bounds on the number, area, and volume transport of non‐scavenged hydrophilic and fully‐scavenged hydrophobic particles of radii between 0.1 and 100 μm for a range of jet and film drops. For droplets containing plastic particulates, we predict particle enrichment is significantly higher in jet drops than film drops. For particles in these jet drops, our results suggest that in the absence of bubble scavenging, the number distribution is dominated by smaller plastics, the mass/volume distribution by larger plastics, and surface area distribution is balanced across plastic size. Whereas for hydrophobic particles, scavenging dramatically modifies these distributions, enhancing certain particle–droplet size combinations by over four orders of magnitude. Our predictions suggest critical effects of enrichment in air‐sea particle transport and highlight the variable dependencies on bubble and particle size, improving our theoretical understanding of plastic and marine particle transport and identifying modeling assumptions to refine with experimental measurements.

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