Plastic literally at the bottom of the ocean. Very sad!

From news.com.au

Man-made horrors lurk at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean

Way, way down at the deepest point of the ocean lies a disaster of humanity’s own making that will never die – with untold consequences.Shannon Molloy3 min readNovember 24, 2021 – 1:18PM24 comments

A helium balloon decorated with characters from the film Frozen at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Picture: Mariana Trench – In Pursuit of the Abyss

The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean, and the deepest part of Earth itself, measuring some 11km down.

So unforgiving are the pitch-black, pressured and near-freezing conditions that we know little about what lurks below, with untold marine treasurers still waiting to be discovered.

Scientists consider the absolute lowest beds of the sea to be about as hard to reach as space.

Victor Vescovo was the last human to do so, reaching a new record depth of 10.9km in April 2019 in a Triton 36000/2 submarine, built to withstand the extreme pressure.

Over five dives to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the American explorer found previously unknown crustacean species, witnessed brightly coloured outcrops and came across a pink snailfish.

Then, scattered throughout a place only two others have ever managed to physically reach, Vescovo saw plastic.

Lolly wrappers and a plastic shopping bag, to be precise.

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Nowhere is safe from humanity

Vescovo’s shock find almost overshadowed his remarkable achievement and the scientific promise of his sea life discoveries.

And for good reason.

“We always had this sense that there was a part of the planet that was beyond, that was untouched by human action,” Eric Galbraith, an ocean biochemist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona and adjunct professor at McGill University in Montreal, told the magazine Maclean’s.

“That used to be true. And now it’s no longer true.”

And unfortunately, Vescovo’s discovery isn’t the first, with previous unmanned voyages to the depths of the Mariana also encountering plenty of plastic pollution.

Showing how extensive the problem is – and how quickly waste can sink down – one dive found the remnants of a helium balloon decorated with characters from the children’s film Frozen, released in 2013.

Vision captured of that dive shows the balloon and, resting next to it, a heavy duty 20-litre plastic bucket.

A scene from the film Mariana Trench – In Pursuit of the Abyss shows plastic waste found by unmanned craft. Picture: YouTube

A Frozen balloon and a plastic bucket was seen in the near-inaccessible area. Picture: YouTube

In 2018, researchers from the Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering in China took samples of water and sediment at depths ranging from 2.5km to 11km.

“Man-made plastics have contaminated the most remote and deepest places on the planet,” they wrote in analysis published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

“The (deepest Mariana) zone is likely one of the largest sinks for microplastic debris on Earth, with unknown but potentially damaging impacts on this fragile ecosystem.”

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