On May 1, Victor Vescovo made a record completing the deepest-ever solo underwater dive. Having reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, he found out that there was another representative of the human world – the plastic.
Victor said he found a plastic bag and candy wrappers on the sea floor, some 35,853 feet below the surface.
Vescovo made the trip as part of his Five Deeps expedition, which is being filmed by the Discovery Channel. The 53-year-old financier and retired naval officer is conducting detailed sonar maps of the deepest parts of the ocean. Trips to the Atlantic Ocean’s Puerto Rico Trench, the South Atlantic’s South Sandwich Trench and the Java Trench in the Indian Ocean have already been completed. The details of the Mariana Trench trip were just released Monday. Finally, Vescovo will explore the Arctic’s Molloy Deep this August.
“I criss-crossed all over the bottom looking for different wildlife, potentially unique geological formations or rocks, man-made objects, and yes, trying to see if there was an even deeper location than where the Trieste went all the way back in 1960,” Vescovo told CNN of his most recent trip. (The Trieste was the first submersible to explore the Challenger Deep.)
In addition to the plastic, Vescovo’s team think they have discovered four new species of prawn-like crustaceans, BBC News reported. However, the scientists plan to test if the animals collected have already encountered humanity in the form of microplastics. A 2017 study found microplastics in crustaceans in six of the deepest parts of the ocean, including the Mariana Trench.
Unfortunately, researchers have earlier found litter at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest trench, Victor Vescovo is not the first. In 2018 scientists documented at least 3,000 pieces of litter in the trench, including a plastic bag at 36,000 feet below sea level. About 8 million tons of plastic enter the world’s oceans every year. With such scenario, there gonna be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.