This is simultaneously depressing and darkly impressive - human pollution has literally reached the deepest point on Earth.
A few thoughts:
1. The preservation at those depths must be incredible. No UV degradation, minimal biological activity, near-freezing temps. That bottle could last centuries or millennia down there.
2. How did it even get there? The Mariana Trench is ~7 miles deep. Did it sink naturally, or was there ocean current transport involved? The logistics of trash reaching that depth are fascinating.
3. What's the microplastic situation? If a whole bottle made it down there, the microplastic concentration must be significant. Are we seeing bioaccumulation in deep-sea organisms?
4. This feels like a modern version of finding Everest's "death zone" littered with oxygen tanks. Humans can't physically reach these places easily, yet our waste gets there anyway.
5. Any monitoring/tracking efforts? Can we trace where this stuff originates? Ocean currents are complex but somewhat predictable.
The sad reality: if we can pollute the Mariana Trench, there's literally nowhere on Earth untouched by human activity. Makes me wonder what the long-term ecological impact will be on these extreme environments.
The bottle in question seems to be glass, so many of those questions aren't really relevant. Glass doesn't degrade much from UV light, or at all from biological activity, whether on land or under 7 miles of ocean. Glass is denser than water, so it sank.
Because it's an LLM spambot, it "saw" a couple of keywords and wrote a comment that's vaguely relevant to the article at hand. Do help with kicking it out by flagging its comments.
When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.
What purpose does this serve, other than to introduce a word that has no future relevance in the article. It’s just an empty sentence padding the word count.
Solids and liquids mostly don’t compress so as a general rule most can handle those pressures without experiencing any real mechanical stress, as they instantly provide a perfectly matching internal pressure that balances out the forces to zero.
It’s mostly things that contain gases that can get crushed by high pressure. Almost any type of closed cell foam for example, will either collapse to a small size or crack and crumble apart depending on how rigid it is.
Living things tend to get harmed by pressure changes because they have compressible gasses and/or biological compartments that contain things that experience phase changes between gas and liquid at different pressures.
Even so, wouldn't you expect that you could crush an open empty beer bottle by putting a heavy enough weight on it? A human can't do it, but I would expect an elephant can.
There is quite a lot of pressure put outside from the beer of a full bottle, but that little bit of air is probably enough to cause it to implode at some point.
I'll be honest; I have no idea how to estimate that. I'm sure there are folks on here who can (and might). It's probably not as deep as you'd think.
I have a feeling someone dropped this bottle on purpose when they were over the trench. They knew what they were doing. Note the lack of other littler.
I don't see any ads on Firefox (Android) with uBlock Origin.
That site seems horrible though. Random words in the body like reddit are hyperlinks to SEO landing pages on the same site. And there must be a better (original) source for the story than this...
You should really use an ad blocker. The Internet is basically unusable these days without one. I block ad domains at the DNS level too, but the ad blocker is still necessary to remove the empty frames left, sad.
Finally time to switch to protonmail.
A few thoughts:
1. The preservation at those depths must be incredible. No UV degradation, minimal biological activity, near-freezing temps. That bottle could last centuries or millennia down there.
2. How did it even get there? The Mariana Trench is ~7 miles deep. Did it sink naturally, or was there ocean current transport involved? The logistics of trash reaching that depth are fascinating.
3. What's the microplastic situation? If a whole bottle made it down there, the microplastic concentration must be significant. Are we seeing bioaccumulation in deep-sea organisms?
4. This feels like a modern version of finding Everest's "death zone" littered with oxygen tanks. Humans can't physically reach these places easily, yet our waste gets there anyway.
5. Any monitoring/tracking efforts? Can we trace where this stuff originates? Ocean currents are complex but somewhat predictable.
The sad reality: if we can pollute the Mariana Trench, there's literally nowhere on Earth untouched by human activity. Makes me wonder what the long-term ecological impact will be on these extreme environments.
2019 Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag (169 points, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19899374
2019 In Mariana Trench, every animal tested had plastic in its gut (57 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19302531
2018 Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench (359 points, 326 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057305
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/
(lacking details on the bottle itself)
It’s mostly things that contain gases that can get crushed by high pressure. Almost any type of closed cell foam for example, will either collapse to a small size or crack and crumble apart depending on how rigid it is.
Living things tend to get harmed by pressure changes because they have compressible gasses and/or biological compartments that contain things that experience phase changes between gas and liquid at different pressures.
I'll be honest; I have no idea how to estimate that. I'm sure there are folks on here who can (and might). It's probably not as deep as you'd think.
Painful
That site seems horrible though. Random words in the body like reddit are hyperlinks to SEO landing pages on the same site. And there must be a better (original) source for the story than this...
Seems like this is better, or at least maybe a primary source?