The Ocean's Changing Landscape: Insights from the 2024 State of the Ocean Report

Our oceans are undergoing significant changes, with pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss becoming increasingly urgent environmental issues. The State of the Ocean Report 2024, published by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), throws light on these challenges and emphasizes the need for immediate action. Many of the findings in this report are highly relevant to our ERC-funded ATLANTIS project, which focuses on understanding how plastic pollution is impacting marine ecosystems and exploring solutions to mitigate these effects.

Adapting Global Trends to Local Contexts

One of the key points highlighted in the State of the Ocean Report is the importance of recognizing both global trends and local variations in oceans. This is precisely what the ATLANTIS project aims to achieve. Rather than adopting a generalized approach, we focus on regional perspective to better understand how local environmental factors influence the impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems. By adopting a regionalized approach, we can more effectively assess the impacts of plastics and develop clearer, more targeted strategies to protect marine environments.

Tracking Plastic Pollution: Understanding its Fate

Marine pollution`s fate has been poorly studies, particularly plastic and nutrient. Without comprehensive tracking, it is difficult to develop effective strategies to mitigate their impact on marine life. At ATLANTIS, several PhDs are working to understand the fate of plastic in the ocean[1,2]. Using Lagrangian particle models[3,4], we are studying how plastics move across ocean currents, accumulate in certain areas, and pose risks to marine life. This fate is crucial for developing more accurate impact models and targeted interventions.

Blue Carbon: The Intersection of Climate Change and marine plastics

Marine ecosystems play critical role in combating climate change. By capture and store carbon through biological and physical pump, oceans help mitigate the effects of global warming. In ATLANTIS, our research investigates how plastic pollution can interfere with the growth of algae, a key primary producer. Algae is vital in carbon sequestration because of photosynthesis, but plastics can inhibit their growth, reducing the ocean's blue carbon capacity. This research is an important part of our work, and more details on this topic will be shared soon, as our paper is currently under review.

Conclusion

The State of the Ocean Report 2024 highlights the growing challenges facing our oceans, but it also calls for action and the development of solutions that address both global and local scales. The ATLANTIS project is committed to contributing to these efforts by investigating the fate of plastic pollution and its impacts on marine ecosystems at a regional level. As we continue our research, we remain focused on developing strategies to protect the ocean and ensure its resilience in the face of increasing environmental threats.

[1] Høiberg, M. A., Stadler, K., & Verones, F. (2024). Disentangling marine plastic impacts in Life Cycle Assessment: Spatially explicit Characterization Factors for ecosystem quality. Science of The Total Environment, 949, 175019.

[2] Catherine Deschênes. (2024).Who’s that girl? New PhD in ATLANTIS. IndEcol Blog. https://blog.indecol.no/whos-that-girl-new-phd-in-atlantis/

[3] Ocean Parcels. (n.d.). Ocean Parcels. https://oceanparcels.org/

[4] Denes, M. C., & van Sebille, E. (2024). plasticparcels: A python package for marine plastic dispersal simulations and parameterization development using parcels. Journal of Open Source Software, 9(102), 7094.