 "Dive to discover new species in world's deepest oceanic trench also finds plastic")
An underwater exploration team has dived to the deepest trench in the world, the Challenger Deep in Pacific Ocean Mariana Trench and found marine life a-plenty, but also… trash. Victor Vescovo, a pro diver and member of the Deep Five Explorations team, has become the first man to completed a version of the “Four Corners of the Earth”: trek the Mt Everest, dive the Challenger Deep, and ski on both the geographic poles. In an unexpected title that even Vescovo wasn’t expecting, he is now also the first man to discover a plastic bag and sweet wrappers at the bottom of the world’s deepest trench, according to BBC.
Vescovo said he wasn’t surprised by the discovery, though, disappointed to see “human contamination” in the deep ocean. While he saw particles of an object, he can’t be certain if it was made of plastic or metal. They did have sharp edges, he said in
an interview
with Discovery, and one of the particles has a letter printed on it, making the assumption that the object was man-made a fair one. [caption id=“attachment_6629211” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]
What looks like a plastic wrapper at the far right-hand corner of the picture. Image credit: Reuters/ Atlantic Productions[/caption] The dive series has helped the Five Deeps research team identify three new species of marine animals, including a type of long-appendaged Amphipod. Vescovo
told
Discovery that finding new species with each dive isn’t all that surprising either. The dives are intentionally planned in parts of the ocean that haven’t been thoroughly explored. It’s only fair to assume that undiscovered species and evolution taking its course will unearth new deep-sea life forms in dives like Five Deeps’. [caption id=“attachment_6629151” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]
One of the new species captured on camera during the dive to the Mariana Trench. Image credit: Reuters /Atlantic Production[/caption] The expedition reached a maximum depth of 10,928 meters into the Trench. The only two other people to reach these depths was in 2012 by filmmaker James Cameron in his submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, and Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard of the US Navy in the Trieste a deep submarine in 1960. The Deep Five exploratory dives to the five oceans of the world are being
filmed by Atlantic Productions
for a documentary series with Discovery Channel.