A Troubling Discovery in the Deepest Ocean Trenches
In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
Ed Yong
Feb 27, 2019
Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on March 2, 2019.
Alan Jamieson remembers seeing it for the first time: a small, black fiber floating in a tube of liquid. It resembled a hair, but when Jamieson examined it under a microscope, he realized that the fiber was clearly synthetica piece of plastic. And worryingly, his student Lauren Brooks had pulled it from the gut of a small crustacean living in one of the deepest parts of the ocean.
For the past decade,
Jamieson, a marine biologist at Newcastle University, has been sending vehicles to the bottom of marine trenches, which can be as deep as the Himalayas are tall. Once there, these landers have collected amphipodsscavenger relatives of crabs and shrimp that thrive in the abyss. Jamieson originally wanted to know how these animals differ from one distant trench to another. But a few years ago, almost on a whim, he decided to analyze their body for toxic, human-made pollutants such as
polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which have been banned for decades but which persist in nature for much longer.
The team found PCBs galore. Some amphipods were carrying levels
50 times higher than those seen in crabs from one of Chinas most polluted rivers.
When the news broke, Jamieson was inundated with calls from journalists and concerned citizens. And in every discussion, one question kept coming up: What about plastics?
The world produces an estimated
10 tons of plastic a second, and
between 5 million and 14 million tons sweep into the oceans every year. Some of that debris washes up on beaches, even on the
worlds most isolated islands. About
5 trillion pieces currently float in surface waters, mostly in the form of tiny, easy-to-swallow fragments that have ended up in the gut of
albatrosses,
sea turtles,
plankton,
fish, and
whales. But those pieces also sink, snowing into the deep sea and upon the amphipods that live there.