Abstracted/indexed

Plastic pollution is a major environmental issue affecting the world’s oceans. The amount of floating and sedimented pieces has been quantified by several studies. But their abundance in the water column remains mostly unknown. As a step to fill this gap we model the dynamics of a particular type of particles, rigid microplastics sinking rapidly in open sea. We find that they represent a small but appreciable fraction of the total sea plastic, and discuss characteristics of their sinking motion.

Since the mid-1990’s, a series of FES (Finite Element Solution) global ocean tidal atlases have been produced with the primary objective to provide altimetry missions with tidal de-aliasing correction. We describe the underlying hydrodynamic/data assimilation design and accuracy assessments for the FES2014 release. The FES2014 atlas shows overall improved performances and has consequently been integrated in satellite altimetry and gravimetric data processing, and adopted in ITRF standards.

The various currents in the Southwest Pacific Ocean contribute to the redistribution of waters from the subtropical gyre equatorward and poleward. The drivers of their interannual variability are not completely understood, but are usually thought to be related to well-known climate modes of variability. Here, we suggest that oceanic chaotic variability alone, by definition unpredictable, explains the major part of this interannual variability south of 20° S.