
The world's deepest ocean trenches are packed with pollution - rglovejoy
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21716891-nasty-chemicals-abound-what-was-thought-untouched-environment-worlds
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rm_-rf_slash
I hope that the global conversation on ecological protection can evolve from
climate change to tangible effects, like pollution and ocean acidification,
just as climate change evolved from the use of the term global warming.

Ocean acidification in particular ought to be an issue even climate skeptics
can acknowledge is a problem. Unlike climate change, which can be difficult to
communicate due to its abstract nature (we had heat last summer and snow last
winter so what's changing?), you can plainly test acidification with two cups
of water - tap and sparkling - and a pair of litmus slips to show the
difference. Then expand on how all the carbon in the atmosphere does that to
the oceans, and then demonstrate what that does to life in the oceans, from
the algae and plankton to the fish people eat.

Overall I think that focusing on precise tangible issues that people can
observe for themselves is a better way to communicate the need for ecological
protection than to be completely correct in a large and abstract assessment
that people might have trouble following.

Only problem is it's hard to sex up the term "ocean acidification." For
something like that we'd need an attention-grabbing shorthand, like "melty
fishy death water."

~~~
ch4s3
*edit: anecdote ahead

My experience working as a clean air and water advocate in my early 20s was
that people who don't buy into climate change also tend to rationalize away
things like potable water, wildlife, and preservation of natural resources.
The venn diagram of people who don't "believe in" climate change and would
support CO2 cuts to stop ocean acidification is tiny.

However, I'd love to be proven wrong.

~~~
fil_a_del_fee_a
I always agreed that pollution should be a higher priority than climate
change. The onus is on me to drive a hybrid to reduce my co2 output, but
nothing is being done to curb polluting our waterways.

~~~
debacle
Packaging is a great evil. Most of our waste is packaging. My family recycles
a lot, buys glass/aluminum when possible, and still we generate 2-3 bags of
garbage each week, mostly food packaging.

~~~
CalRobert
The supermarkets discovered they can get you to buy more tomatoes when there
are six of them in shiny cellophane, so that's what they do. It's maddening.
Not only that, it's nearly impossible not to use plastic packaging if you're
not handily located near a co-op (or Unverpackt, if you're in Germany). In
many cases I've been looked at suspiciously when I said I didn't need a bag
for my two items at the checkout, as though there were something wrong with
me. Saying "it just winds up in the back of my car" usually convinced them
(never mind that I cycled there...)

~~~
debacle
Cashiers are sometimes bothered when I have a bunch of veggies not in
individual bags, but that bag literally lasts 10 minutes until I get home and
put the produce in the fridge. It's a massive waste.

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pcrh
Given that polychlorinated biphenyls are so much more abundant in the deep sea
trenches than even "In grossly polluted areas, like the Liao River in China"
the scientist in me suspects that something other than pollution might be at
play.

Perhaps deep sea organisms synthesize polychlorinated biphenyls as an adaptive
response? (weirder things are known...) Or perhaps the chemical degradation of
polychlorinated biphenyls is inhibited by the environment?

~~~
ChuckMcM
I had that thought as well, however when you look at the differences of the
two systems I don't think it holds up well. Consider that every other tested
source mentioned has a natural diluting mechanism, whether it is a river
receiving runoff rainwater or a tidal area. The trench on the other hand
represents a global minimum. Nothing really comes "up" from the trench in
quantity so it is in some ways a perfect 'sink'. As such it may be in the
process of simply getting more and more concentrated. There chemical inertness
would make them extremely long lived under the conditions of the trench.

~~~
eanzenberg
It's a sink only for things more dense than the water at that depth. Even the
great pacific garbage patch floats.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I assume it's present in low concentrations in heavy trash or perhaps the
flesh of creatures that sink to the bottom after death, slowly building up
over time.

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philipkglass
_Precisely why the Mariana trench has such elevated levels of polychlorinated
biphenyls remains unclear. Dr Jamieson suspects it has to do with the trench’s
proximity to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a whirlpool hundreds of
kilometres across that has amassed enormous quantities of plastics over the
years, and which has the potential to send the pollutants that bind to those
plastics deep into the ocean as the plastics degrade and descend._

I think that this guess is likely to be right. It would take a very long time
for fluid convection and diffusion to transport these pollutants to such
depths. But particles of plastic that are higher-density than water will
collect a lot of these strongly hydrophobic pollutants on their surfaces and
sink deeply much faster than convection/diffusion operate.

There is a "missing plastic" question in environmental science. We see a lot
of plastic trash near the surface in oceans, but the visible amount is much
less than the amount humans seem to be adding to the ocean each year.

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/ninety-nine-
percent-o...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/ninety-nine-percent-
oceans-plastic-missing)

Where is the "missing" plastic? It seems likely that some of it is sinking to
the ocean floor, either because the plastic itself is denser than water or
because it builds up denser-than-water growths on its surface. Finding
polychlorinated biphenyls and brominated ethers concentrated at such depths
is, IMO, pretty convincing evidence for plastics and the pollutants
concentrated on their surfaces sinking into the benthic zone.

(Another part of the missing plastic may be gone due to colonization and
_digestion_ of plastics by natural hydrocarbon-eaters; see "Life in the
“Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris" for a really
fascinating paper about this phenomenon.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tracy_Mincer/publicatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tracy_Mincer/publication/237094808_Life_in_the_Plastisphere_Microbial_Communities_on_Plastic_Marine_Debris/links/0c96053397631e606c000000/Life-
in-the-Plastisphere-Microbial-Communities-on-Plastic-Marine-Debris.pdf) )

It's rather alarming to find such concentrated pollution so far away from its
human sources. But at the risk of sounding callous, it's kind of good news for
humans and our critical ecosystem services: these very deep ocean regions are
relatively isolated from most seafood eaten by humans, and from the photic
zone whose photosynthesis is an important part of the carbon cycle. If
persistent pollution has to partition somewhere, partitioning into the deepest
parts of the ocean is about the best case scenario for surface life.

~~~
Shivetya
hopefully people in power don't get to the idea that since it might not be
harmful to us where it is at that we should purposefully put stuff there

~~~
tsomctl
That thought has already crossed their mind. I have an old textbook on energy
that shows people pushing 50 gallon drums of nuclear waste into the ocean.

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leeoniya
A bit off-topic, but...

"If Mount Everest were flipped upside down into it, there would still be more
than 2km of clear water between the mountain’s base and the top of the ocean"

This statement always bugs me, the elevation at Everest's base is already
~14,000ft. Its prominence is not its full elevation. When you try to have
someone imagine "flipping it upside down", a person wouldn't typically
consider including the surrounding terrain, but simply ignore the fact that
it's already at great elevation.

~~~
niftich
I get what you're saying, but the definition of the term 'prominence' doesn't
help you, because by definition, Mount Everest's 'prominence' equals its
actual height above MSL. This special case is necessary to give the recursive
definition of 'prominence' a base case.

However, it's true that Mount Everest's "relief above local terrain" is not
equal to its actual altitude above MSL, but this is just informal empirical
footballing and no rigorous technical definitions exist.

~~~
jagger27
If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would
be.

~~~
atmosx
> If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things
> would be.

<rant>

Blah, boring. I remember a girl describing how nice everything would be if
everything was _symmetrical_ and deterministic, from language, to language, to
numbers, to nature, to math... In the end she went on describing _heaven_ as
such a place... Man, for the first time in my life I thought that if heaven is
like this, I'd like never go there :-)

When Homer described Helen, he wrote "The most beautiful woman in the world",
he left the details to the reader. Now imagine if he had added the slightest
hint of determinism...

</rant>

~~~
dpc59
I might just be arguing semantics here, but it's possible that the world we
live in is determinist, just in a way too complex for us to even grasp.

~~~
atmosx
That doesn't take away my argument though: It would be too boring if there was
nothing _patternless_.

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Apocryphon
Sounds like even more problems for a prospective future undersea colony beyond
the crushing weight of pressure.

~~~
leeoniya
it's only "crushing" relative to you.

aliens may consider being at very bottom of 50mi of O2/N2 atmosphere @ 14.7
psi to be crushing relative to the vacuum of space.

~~~
jtmarmon
yes...i think the parent is referring to humans, not aliens.

~~~
leeoniya
the point is, what's living at these pressures is not human, so you cannot
ascribe to them a human-relative definition of "crushing". it's obviously
normal and not "crushing" to them.

~~~
jtmarmon
yes, but I imagine by "future undersea colony" Apocryphon is referring to a
colony of humans...

~~~
leeoniya
ah, i missed that bit. time for more coffee it seems.

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Nomentatus
Most of the plastic in the ocean comes from street litter in coastal cities.
If you smoke, that includes cigarette butts (the filters are not natural
cellulose anymore), as well as the plastic wrapped around the package that so
many let fall to the sidewalk.

~~~
Nomentatus
I think this is my only zero vote, ever. I'm amazed that a useful and
practical (for our environment) suggestion was downvoted here; whereas I'd
expect that if Brietbart had a forum (which maybe they do, I rarely if ever
visit the site.) Did someone not google and assume natural cellulose was
obviously still used in filters? It isn't, it's synthetic, a polymer that
doesn't degrade.

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ridgeguy
The Economist summary says the amphipods that were found to contain PCBs were
collected by baiting traps with mackerel.

I don't have access to the original research report, but I wonder if they
analyzed the mackerel for those pollutants?

~~~
artine
From the paper: "The traps were baited with ~100 g of mackerel that was
enclosed in a mesh bag to allow the development of an odour plume, but prevent
the amphipods consuming any of the bait that might otherwise affect POP levels
in downstream assays."

So even if the mackerel did contain the pollutants, they weren't transferred
to the amphipods.

~~~
ridgeguy
Thanks for this. I thought it was unlikely they hadn't controlled for
pollution in the bait, but simple things sometimes slip through.

------
alkonaut
If this doesn't end bad for humans it sure will when it's the plot of a sci-fi
horror movie.

------
ge96
Some day it would be awesome to build swarms of autonomous deep-sea robots.
Ahhh... imagine if they ate tiny plastic like plankton for whales haha.

I know just bs, not a novel idea, until you do it just spewing smoke.

So much to learn still, I'm currently oriented to web dev not hardware
programming but I have a hardware friend though, math friend, pieces will fit
someday perhaps.

The ocean is such a mystery/entrancing.

Just imagine if you had a bunch of robots just out there doing there thing and
you could "ssh" into them by satellite haha would be nuts.

