HORRORS OF THE DEEP
Plastic carrier bag found in the deepest ocean trench
PLASTIC rubbish is now so common on the sea bed that it has been found in the deepest place on earth.
A plastic bag has been discovered more than six miles down in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
It is remarkable evidence of how our plastic rubbish – used for a few seconds before being tossed away – is ending up in every corner of the planet.
Plastic has already been found at the bottom of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans, and on uninhabited Pacific islands thousands of miles from civilisation.
Particles of plastic have been found swirling in the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink.
Vast ‘ garbage patches’ hundreds of miles wide where the sea has been turned into a toxic soup of plastic fragments are now a feature of all oceans.
The Daily Mail has led calls to stop plastic pollution with its Turn the Tide on Plastic campaign.
The latest shocking evidence of how humanity is turning the earth into a rubbish tip was uncovered by scientists who carried out thousands of dives using submersibles to reach the bottom of the deepest ocean, the Pacific.
The manned and robot submarines took video and photographic images of the sea life, but they also catalogued thousands of pieces of rubbish. Japanese and British scientists compiled a database of images from 5,010 dives between 1983 and 2014.
A plastic bag, broken into fragments, was found at a depth of 35,700ft in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific in May 1998. The trench, a crescent-shaped scar in the earth’s crust, reaches a depth of 36,070ft at Challenger Deep at its southern end – the deepest point of the earth’s oceans.
Footage from dives in the North Pacific reveals rubber gloves, car tyres, drink cans, crisp and sweet packets, nylon ropes, plastic baskets, bins and trainers. A plastic toy plane bears the logo Pan Am – the US airline went bust in 1991 but the toy is likely to remain on the sea bed for hundreds of years.
Man-made debris was found on 3,425 of the dives, of which 33 per cent was large pieces of plastic. Of these 89 per cent were single-use items.The research by the Japan Agency for Marine-earth Science and Technology, published in Marine Policy, said in the deep North Pacific there were between 44 and 867 pieces of plastic per square mile. ruth Fletcher, of the United Nations environment Programme, based in Cambridge, who took part in the research, said: ‘Plastic has reached the far corners of the ocean. That is shocking.’
Pupils caught taking plastic water bottles into a leading independent school could be punished in the same way as if they were found smoking behind the bike sheds. Brighton College in east Sussex is the first school in Britain to brand single-use plastics ‘anti-social’ and ban them.