Modelling the transportation of marine plastics over the ocean surface by Cellular Automata

This article describes a novel Cellular Automata (CA) model to predict the transportation of buoyant marine plastics. The proposed CA model provides a simpler and more affordable approach to a field where the computationally intensive Lagrangian particle-tracking models dominate. The transportation of marine plastics was investigated using well-defined, probabilistic rules governing the advection and diffusion processes. The CA model was applied to evaluate the impact of two input scenarios, namely a "population" and a "river" scenario. Of the sub-tropical gyres, a high percentage of buoyant plastics were found in the Indian gyre (population: 5.0 %; river: 5.5 %) and North Pacific gyre (population: 5.5 %; river: 7 %). These findings show good agreement with previously published results from particle-tracking models. The CA model could be a useful rapid-scenario assessment tool for the estimation marine plastic pollution prior to more in-depth studies on effective mitigation measures to, for example, reduce plastics waste.