Even the most isolated places on earth cannot escape the claws of plastic garbage.
A plastic bag floats in the waters of Manila Bay, Philippines.
The Mariana Trench deep in the Pacific Ocean is the deepest point in the ocean, and its depth is as much as 11,000 meters. However, if you think that you can escape the grip of global plastic pollution, then you are wrong.
In a recent study, the researchers discovered a plastic bag in the Mariana Trench, which was 11,000 meters deep, and, like the plastic bags used in grocery stores, is the deepest plastic waste that humans have discovered so far. Plastic bags were discovered by scientists during a visit to the deep sea garbage database. The deep sea garbage database is a collection of videos and pictures taken by humans over 5010 dive activities in the past 30 years and has recently been made public.
Plastics are the most common type of trash that can be listed in the database. Plastic bags, on the other hand, account for most of the plastic waste. Others come from materials such as rubber, metal, wood, cloth, and others that need to be classified.
Most plastics (up to 89%) are plastic products that have been thrown away once, such as plastic bottles and disposable plastic items.
Although the Mariana Trench looks like an inanimate, dark, deep ditch, the number of creatures here actually exceeds our imagination. In 2016, the USS National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Okanagaros explorer survey ship Exploration of the Mariana Trench has led to the discovery of large numbers of organisms such as corals, jellyfish and octopi. Recent studies have also found that 17% of the rubbish data recorded in the deep sea litter database showed some kind of marine life. Signs of interaction, such as sea animals tangled in trash.
Where does the rubbish come from?
The new study is just one of many studies that show that plastic waste worldwide is extremely common. Disposable plastic products around the world are almost everywhere, and once they go into the wild, they take hundreds of years or more to degrade.
In February last year, another study showed that the overall pollution situation in some areas of the Mariana Trench is more severe than some of the most polluted rivers in China. The authors of the study believe that some of the chemical pollutants in the Mariana Trench may be Plastics from the ocean degrade.
In recent years, plastics have become more and more the focus of environmental movements. For example, Earth Day just used plastics as its theme. Although plastics can directly enter the ocean, for example, wind blows plastic garbage on the beach into the ocean, or ships directly Dived into the ocean, but a study published in 2017 found that most of the plastic waste comes from the 10 rivers that flow through the most polluted regions of the world.
Abandoned fishing gear is also one of the major sources of plastic waste. A study published in March last year found that the major component of the floating Pacific Ocean belt between Hawaii and California is fishing gear.
Although the plastic waste in the ocean is far more than a plastic bag, the meaning of this plastic bag is very significant. It is an illustration of the far-reaching human influence on the Earth.