Atlantic productions for Discovery Channel: Victor Vescovo spent four hours exploring the bottom of the trench

Man makes dive in Mariana Trench only to find what appears to be plastic

A retired naval officer, Victor Vescovo went on the deepest dive ever made by the human inside a submarine. The first dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench was in 1960 by US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in a vessel called the bathyscaphe Trieste.

The new record holder, Victor Vescovo dived nearly 35,853ft in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench. In the last three weeks, the expedition team has made four dives in the Mariana Trench, collecting biological and rock samples.

The team believes they have discovered four new species of prawn-like called amphipods, a creature called spoon worm and a pink snailfish. Moreover, they also discovered colored rocky outcrops and collected some samples of rock from the seafloor.

However, Vescovo found the manmade material on the ocean floor which appears to be plastic.  According to the United Nations, 100m tonnes of plastic waste has reached epidemic proportions in the world’s oceans. These millions of tonnes of plastic enter the oceans with no clue about where to end up.

Many scientists are now working on to test and see the creatures they collected contain microplastics; even the ones that live on the deepest part of the ocean.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48230157