Trash found littering ocean floor in deepest-ever sub dive
- 5 years ago
An American explorer has completed what's claimed to be the deepest manned sea dive EVER recorded.
For more on this and other news around the world, let's turn to our Hong Yoo…
So Yoo, an amazing achievement, but the explorer returned to the surface with depressing news:.... there's plastic trash all the way down there...
Unfortunately, yes, Mark.
Victor Vescovo, a retired naval officer from Texas, made the unsettling discovery as he dived around ten-point-nine kilometers under the ocean to a point in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.
It's the deepest solo dive in history, but Vescovo found out that even at the deepest point on the planet, plastic waste such as plastic bags and candy wrappers, could be observed.
Details of the voyage were released for the first time on Monday.
Vescovo said he and his team had undertaken the challenge to test the limits of human endeavors as much as scientific discovery.
"It was an amazing experience. It was an amazing dive - I think almost exactly 12 hours - three and a half down, four on the bottom, I think the longest anybody's ever been on the bottom of the Challenger Deep. And then about four hours up. I went through pretty much all of my electrical power and had to be swapping batteries around and circuits around. It was a great journey. Saw some really interesting things on the bottom."
Over the last three weeks, the expedition has made four dives in the Mariana Trench in Vescovo's submarine, "DSV Limiting Factor", collecting biological and rock samples, as well as four new species that could offer clues about the origins of life on Earth.
The team said its scientists are going to perform tests on these samples to determine the percentage of plastics found in them.
For more on this and other news around the world, let's turn to our Hong Yoo…
So Yoo, an amazing achievement, but the explorer returned to the surface with depressing news:.... there's plastic trash all the way down there...
Unfortunately, yes, Mark.
Victor Vescovo, a retired naval officer from Texas, made the unsettling discovery as he dived around ten-point-nine kilometers under the ocean to a point in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.
It's the deepest solo dive in history, but Vescovo found out that even at the deepest point on the planet, plastic waste such as plastic bags and candy wrappers, could be observed.
Details of the voyage were released for the first time on Monday.
Vescovo said he and his team had undertaken the challenge to test the limits of human endeavors as much as scientific discovery.
"It was an amazing experience. It was an amazing dive - I think almost exactly 12 hours - three and a half down, four on the bottom, I think the longest anybody's ever been on the bottom of the Challenger Deep. And then about four hours up. I went through pretty much all of my electrical power and had to be swapping batteries around and circuits around. It was a great journey. Saw some really interesting things on the bottom."
Over the last three weeks, the expedition has made four dives in the Mariana Trench in Vescovo's submarine, "DSV Limiting Factor", collecting biological and rock samples, as well as four new species that could offer clues about the origins of life on Earth.
The team said its scientists are going to perform tests on these samples to determine the percentage of plastics found in them.