On
the deepest dive ever made by a human inside a submarine, a Texas investor
found something he could have found in the gutter of nearly any street in the
world: litter. Victor Vescovo, a retired naval officer, made the unsettling
discovery as he descended nearly 35,853ft (10,927 meters) to a point in the
Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench that is the deepest place on Earth, his
expedition said in a statement on Monday. His dive went 52ft (16 meters) lower
than the previous deepest descent in the trench in 1960.
Vescovo,
the Dallas-based co-founder of Insight Equity Holdings, a private equity fund,
found the manmade material on the ocean floor and is trying to confirm that it
is plastic, said Stephanie Fitzherbert, a spokeswoman for Vescovo’s Five Deeps
Expedition.
Plastic
waste has reached epidemic
proportions with an estimated 100m tonnes of it now found
in the world’s oceans, according to the United Nations.
It
was the third time humans have dived to the deepest point in the ocean, known
as Challenger Deep. The Canadian film-maker James Cameron was the last to visit
in 2012 in his submarine, reaching a depth of 35,787ft (10,908 meters).
Prior
to Cameron’s dive, the first-ever expedition to Challenger Deep was made by the
US Navy in 1960, reaching a depth of 35,800ft (10,912 meters).