Microplastic characteristics within the Scotia Sea water column across differing environmental regimes, austral summer 2022-2023

This dataset contains attributes of individual microplastics sampled via a CTD within the Scotia Sea water column (50m, 150/200m, 500m, 1000m), at three different stations (A23, M2, P3) during the austral summer 2022-2023. It is in contribution to a study investigating the vertical distribution (in terms of abundance and polymer type) of microplastics collected in areas of the Scotia Sea characterised by contrasting environmental regimes.
Data is organised as individual microplastic particle per row, categorised by station and then depth. Microplastic attributes included in the dataset consist of: polymer type; known density of identified polymer used in subsequent calculations; particle length; particle width; and associated calculated values of: surface area (A), particle thickness (T), proportion of bounding rectangle filled by the 2D shape to account for T concavity (P), volume (V), and concluded microplastic particle mass.

The work was funded by the CUPIDO UKRI FLF grant number MR/T020962/1.