Tracking Of Plastic In Our Seas

Project Information

TOPIOS

Grant agreement ID: 715386

DOI

10.3030/715386

Project closed

EC signature date 17 January 2017

Start date 1 April 2017

End date 31 March 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 484 760,00

EU contribution

€ 1 484 760,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - TOPIOS (Tracking Of Plastic In Our Seas)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2022-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Marine plastic pollution is a major environmental problem, that is drawing considerable attention from scientists, policymakers and the public. However, we only have reliable estimates of the whereabouts of an estimated 1% of all plastic that has ever gone into the ocean. The other 99% is ‘missing’. Having a better understanding of the whereabouts of this missing plastic is important for society, because as long as we don’t know where the overwhelming majority of the plastic waste ends up (seafloor? coastlines? degraded?), it is unclear where the harm of this plastic pollution is largest and hence where policy should be targeted to.

The ERC Starting Grant project ‘Tracking Of Plastics In Our Seas’ (TOPIOS) aims to create the first three-dimensional map of all the plastic in our ocean. Halfway the project, it has focused mostly on the surface of the ocean, where it has resolved the long-standing question which processes accumulate plastic into the infamous ‘garbage patches’ in the centres of the ocean basins. It has created a next-generation open-source computer code to simulate the movements of virtual plastic. With that, it has mapped the plastic in the global ocean.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

With a total of 35 open access peer-reviewed articles, TOPIOS has made deep and fundamental advances into the community’s understanding of how ocean currents transport plastic. We have shown how most plastic that enters the ocean from land, remains within the coastal zone for very long times (Onink et al 2021, Van der Mheen et al 2020, Morales-Caselles et al 2021, Kaandorp et al 2020, Van Duinen et al 2022). We have also shown how biofouling by marine algae affects the buoyancy of floating microplastics and can thus make them sink (Lobelle et al 2021, Fischer et al 2022, De la Fuente et al 2021).

Furthermore, TOPIOS has supported large review articles on The Physical Oceanography of the Transport of Floating Marine Debris (Van Sebille et al 2020), on Lagrangian Ocean Analysis (Van Sebille et al 2018), on satellite remote sensing of plastics (Martinez-Vicente et al 2019), and on a concept for an Integrated Ocean Observing System (Maximenko et al 2019). Finally, TOPIOS has developed the open-source OceanParcels.org framework (Lange and Van Sebille 2017; Delandmeter and Van Sebille 2019), which is now the backbone tool for both the TOPIOS project itself as well as dozens of international groups who simulate plastics and other material through the ocean.

Finally, TOPIOS results and staff have informed policy-making at national and European levels, has been featured in more than 40 international media, and has been at the foundation of the SeaClearly Team that won the 2022 BlueCloud hackathon for their idea to use TOPIOS technology to support Environmental Impact Assessments for aquaculture farming.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The accelerated development of the oceanparcels.org tool, due solely to the funding from TOPIOS, has ensured that the ultimate goal of the project, a full three-dimensional map of plastic in our oceans, is expected to be complete within months after the formal end of the project.

Schematic of the physical processes that affect the transport of plastic in the ocean.