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.

Detecting changes at the leading edge of an interface between oceanic water layers.

Many physical phenomena in the ocean involve interactions between water masses of different temperatures and salinities at boundaries. Of particular interest is the characterisation of finescale structure at the marginal interaction zones of these boundaries, where the structure is either destroyed by mixing or formed by stratification. Using high-resolution seismic reflection imaging, we present observations of temporal changes at the leading edge of an interface between sub-thermocline layers in the Panama Basin.