Microplastic contaminants potentially distort our understanding of the ocean's carbon cycle

We tested whether conventional methods used to quantify OM and its isotopic composition from marine samples are affected by the inclusion of Microplastic-derived carbon (Polyethylene and Polystyrene). Estuarine sediment was used as the natural background SOM pool due to its higher carbon content compared to suspended POM and DOM in seawater. MP samples were mixed with sediment to produce a range of weight percentages of MPs to be analyzed by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS).

The data set contains raw data from the EA conducted on pure plastic, pure sediments, and admixtures.