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The missing ocean plastic sink: Gone with the rivers

Weiss, Lisa, Ludwig, Wolfgang, Heussner, Serge, Canals, Miquel, Ghiglione, Jean-François, Estournel, Claude, Constant, Mel, Kerhervé, Philippe·2021·Science
DOI 10.1126/science.abe0290
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Abstract

No missing sink: 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

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Metadata

Authors
Weiss, L., Ludwig, W., Heussner, S., Canals, M., Ghiglione, J.-F., Estournel, C., Constant, M., & Kerhervé, P.
Venue
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Published
2021-07-02
Volume
373
Issue
6550
Pages
107-111
ISSN
  • 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
  • 1095-9203
DOI
10.1126/science.abe0290
OpenAlex
W3174858190
Cited by
372
References
16
FWCI
12.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Funders
  • Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche  et de l’Innovation
  • Université de Perpignan Via Domitia

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The missing ocean plastic sink: Gone with the rivers. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.abe0290
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Weiss, L., Ludwig, W., Heussner, S., Canals, M., Ghiglione, J.-F., Estournel, C., Constant, M., & Kerhervé, P. (2021). The missing ocean plastic sink: Gone with the rivers. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe0290

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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