With a depth of 10,898 meters, Marian Ditch counts among the most isolated and yet practically unattainable place in the world. And even if people have never been there, their garbage is already there. The first finding of a disposable plastic bag was recorded here twenty years ago, on May 20, 1998. And far from being the only one. The Japanese research agency JAMSTEC, which has been managing a deep sea debris database for thirty years, records 3425 more such "forgotten" items.
Treasures of human civilization
People from JAMSTEC are being carefully monitored, and their video recordings are taken by the snowshoes. They are interested in what kind of waste they actually are. What are their origins and whether they decompose. In total, they have made over 5,100 such dives, showing that over 90% of extreme waste plastics have their origins in the most usual disposable bags. Approximately one-third of them fall into the category of macroplastics (fragments larger than 5 millimeters).
"Closer to the surface of plastic rubbish kills whales, poison the entire marine ecosystems, creates surface scraps of garbage, and island tropical paradises make incarnated nightmares. Eventually it will end here, " writes JAMSTEC. The research of plastering of plastic waste in the water column is important because it helps to understand the overall dynamics of pollution distribution. Meanwhile, it has been shown that "debris" of debris is taking place on the high seas, far from the inhabited coast.
The problem is no less, on the contrary. "Deep-sea trenches have been considered for many years to be an extremely hostile environment for living, for unoccupied territories. But Marine Ditch is not a sterile, dump-free living, and the waste is slowly decreasing and this still untouched ecosystem is disturbing.
The view of the DsD database is really worth it. It is a very illustrative example of what people do in nature and gives the term deep archeology a completely different meaning. The samples are sorted according to their composition on plastics, rubber, metal, glass, wood, fabric (and also on objects of unidentified or natural origin).
You will find out in what depth the buried artifact of human civilization is buried (you can also look at the map) and, above all, what the subject of ordinary use is about. You may also find ones you have at home. And maybe it will make you think about where your garbage can get once.
Author: Radomír Dohnal, Associate of Ekolistu.cz
Source: Ekolist.cz