It was the first time that human eyes had seen the seabed of the Atacama Trench, 8,000 meters deep, off the coast of Chile. And what the scientists saw paralyzed them. The submersible’s cameras showed a blue plastic bag at the bottom of the sea.
“It was a bucket of cold water to see that, before us, our waste had arrived,” he said. Osvaldo Ulloawho last January led the first scientific expedition to the trench that delineates the contact between the oceanic lithosphere of the Nazca plate and the continental lithosphere of the South American plate, in the Pacific Ocean.
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The video of the moment in which the expedition ran into the plastic was disclosed by the electronic newspaper The counter. The images clearly show a plastic bag resting on the seabed.
Ulloa, director of the Millennium Institute of Oceanography, was outraged: “Plastics will remain at the bottom of the sea for centuries, not as a milestone of our audacity and technological progress, but of our arrogance and insensitivity to the damage we are causing to the oceans”.
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“The truth is that it is very dramatic to know that there is garbage at more than 8000 meters. We need to make an urgent cultural change, to stop thinking that the ocean is a big dump”, he stated.
It is not the first time that garbage has been found in a sea trench
But what was found in the Atacama Trench does not surprise the scientific world. It is not the first time that waste has been found in a marine trench.
In 2021, Japanese researchers found plastic bags, toys, slippers and even a mannequin head in the Mariana Trenchin the Western Pacific, whose maximum depth is 10,994 meters at the southern end of a small marine valley.
