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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Pollution
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1556592
This article is part of the Research Topic Fate and Effects of Sediment and Emerging Pollutants in Marine and Estuarine Environments View all 4 articles
Elucidating the distribution and characteristics of microplastics in water column of the northwestern South China Sea with a large-volume in situ filtration technology (plankton pump)
Provisionally accepted- 1 Yantai University, Yantai, Shandong Province, China
- 2 East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Microplastic pollution has emerged as an undeniable marine environmental issue.While a distribution map of microplastics in the upper ocean has been established, the patterns of microplastics within the water column remain unclear. In this study, a largevolume in situ filtration device with filtration efficiency of 30 m 3 /h was employed to investigate microplastics in the deep waters of the South China Sea. The abundance of microplastics ranged from 0.2 to 1.5 items per cubic meter (n/m 3 ), with an average of 0.56 ± 0.40 n/m 3 . Microplastics are primarily fragments (72.58%) and fibers (20.97%), with the predominant polymer types being polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The average size of microplastics is 0.91 ± 0.97 mm, with no statistically significant differences observed across different water layers from 50 to 1000 meter (m). Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) analysis indicated that microplastics in the water column primarily originated from surface waters in the studied region. The occurrence of microplastics in the marine water column is a complex environmental process, influenced by a range of oceanographic mechanisms, including biological, chemical, and physical interactions. Our results provided reliable baseline data on microplastics in the water column of the South China Sea, contributing a better understanding to the vertical transport and fate of microplastics in this region.
Keywords: Microplastics, South China Sea, source, distribution, Vertical transport
Received: 07 Jan 2025; Accepted: 21 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Zhu, Wang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Lixin Zhu, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
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