What is at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench?
At the deepest point on Earth, explorers found something disturbingly human.
The answer
The Challenger Deep, the lowest known point of the Mariana Trench, reaches a staggering 10,935 meters below sea level. When filmmaker James Cameron made his solo descent in 2012, and when Victor Vescovo reached the bottom in 2019, both found evidence of human pollution: a plastic bag and candy wrappers were observed on the seafloor. Despite the crushing pressure of over 1,000 atmospheres, life persists there in the form of amphipods and xenophyophores, single-celled organisms the size of a fist.
Source: National Geographic
- Mariana Trench
- Challenger Deep
- ocean pollution
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