Pollution Has Worked Its Way Down To The World's Deepest Waters

2/14/2017

The Mariana Trench in the northern Pacific is the deepest part of the world's oceans. You might think a place that remote would be untouched by human activity.  But the Mariana Trench is polluted.

At its deepest — about 7 miles down — the water in the trench is near freezing. The pressure would crush a human like a bug. Scientists have only recently explored it. Among them is biologist Alan Jamieson of Newcastle University in England. His team dropped what they call a mechanical "lander" down into the trench. It had cameras and water samplers and some baited traps. They didn't really know what they'd find.

When the lander surfaced, the traps contained amphipods — shrimplike crustaceans. That wasn't terribly surprising, as amphipods are known to live at great depths. But bringing them back from the Mariana Trench was a rarity, and Jamieson thought there might be something to learn from them. He took the creatures to an environmental scientist.

"So we just sort of turn up with this really weird looking animal," he says, "and joking aside, he came back and said these are really badly contaminated."

The amphipods were contaminated with PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls — toxic chemicals used for decades in industry, as well as other industrial pollutants known as persistent organic pollutants.
"Every sample we had," Jamieson says, "had contaminants in it at very high or extraordinarily high levels."

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