September 27, 2019

Last month, on August 24, the American undersea explorer Victor Vescovo reached the Molloy Deep (also known as the Molloy Hole), the deepest point—some 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) beneath the surface—of the Arctic Ocean. Upon completion of the dive, Vescovo became the first person to dive to the deepest parts of all five of the world’s oceans. Over the previous 10 months, Vescovo’s Five Deeps Expedition had reached the ultimate bottoms of the Atlantic, Southern, Indian, and Pacific oceans.

American explorer Victor Vescovo and the Five Deeps team discuss the South Sandwich Trench near Antarctica on Feb. 3, 2019. Credit: © The Five Deeps Expedition

Victor Vescovo was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1966. He developed a love of the ocean as a 20-year officer in the United States Navy Reserve. At the same time, he made a fortune as a private businessman. Vescovo’s taste for adventure pushed him to climb the highest peaks on each of the world’s continents—including Asia’s Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. He has also skied to the North and South poles and is an airplane and helicopter pilot.

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The Five Deeps Expedition reached the five deepest points of the world’s oceans. Credit: WORLD BOOK illustration by Brenda Tropinski; © Best Backgrounds/Shutterstock

Having conquered the world’s summits, Vescovo planned the Five Deeps Expedition to explore its depths. Vescovo and his company Caladan Oceanic put together a team of engineers, scientists, and experienced sea personnel. Caladan’s specially designed submersible, Limiting Factor, made the deep dives, supported by the surface vessel Pressure Drop. A submersible is an undersea vessel used for oceanographic research and exploration.

On April 2, 2019, the Five Deeps submersible Limiting Factor rests on the surface of the Indian Ocean behind the support ship Pressure Drop. Credit: © The Five Deeps Expedition

Five Deeps began in December 2018 at the Bronson Deep in the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest point of the Atlantic Ocean. (A deep is an ocean area with a depth of more than 18,000 feet [5,490 meters]). Vescovo set an Atlantic record by diving alone in Limiting Factor to a depth of 27,480 feet (8,376 meters). (Mount Everest goes 29,035 feet [8,850 meters] in the other direction.) Two months later, in February 2019, Vescovo and his team took Pressure Drop near the coast of Antarctica above the South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean. Vescovo then set a Southern Ocean record by diving solo to a depth of 24,390 feet (7,434 meters). (Determining exact depths can be tricky, but after the Five Deeps numbers are verified, they will slightly redefine the landscape of the world’s ocean bottoms.)

In April, Five Deeps headed to the Indian Ocean and the Java Trench (also called the Sunda Trench) near the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Vescovo took Limiting Factor to a depth of 23,596 feet (7,192 meters) in the Indian Ocean, and captured film of a new species of hadal snailfish (a type of sea snail) and other deep bottom-dwelling creatures. The crew then took Pressure Drop above Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, an underwater depression in the Pacific Ocean that is the deepest known spot in the world. There, in May, Vescovo set a record for the deepest ever dive, reaching 35,853 feet (10,927 meters) into Challenger Deep’s eastern pool. The previous depth record was set at Challenger Deep in 1960 by the U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard, who dived 35,797 feet (10,911 meters) beneath the ocean surface in the bathyscaph (a special diving craft) Trieste. Vescovo discovered three new species of marine animals on his voyage to the bottom of Challenger Deep—along with pieces of plastic trash and other signs of pollution.

In 1960, Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard (center) descended into the Mariana Trench with Lieutenant Don Walsh (front) of the United States Navy. Credit: Steve Nicklas, NOS/NGS

The Five Deeps Expedition explored another Pacific deep point in June, diving 35,509 feet (10,823 meters) to the bottom of the Tonga Trench’s Horizon Deep. And then in early August, while traveling through the North Atlantic on the way to the Arctic, Five Deeps visited the watery grave of the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic, some 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) beneath the waves. A couple weeks later, the team reached the Molloy Trench off the coast of Norway, where Vescovo made the final dive. The Five Deeps Expedition, whose motto was In Profundo: Cognitio (Latin for In the Deeps: Knowledge), wrapped up in September.

The Five Deeps Expedition traveled more than 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers), discovered several new species of marine animals, and mapped over 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) of sea floor. In addition to the piloted dives, the Five Deeps team deployed robotic deep-sea landers in several locations. The expedition also recorded over 500 hours of video that will be made into the Discovery Channel documentary series “Deep Planet,” scheduled to air in 2020.

September 21, 2018

In the Pacific Ocean, floating plastic pollution has collected into a giant area of marine debris known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). Marine debris consists of garbage dumped directly into the ocean or carried there by waterways. Such debris can injure animals or make them ill. It can also poison and bury marine habitat. The GPGP, also called the Pacific trash vortex, spans an astounding 600,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers) of ocean surface—an area more than twice the size of Texas and nearly three times the size of France.

A member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) helps disentangle an albatross chick from plastic debris in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. Credit: Ryan Tabata, NOAA

The GPGP is actually two large fields of marine debris, a western patch near Japan and an eastern patch near Hawaii. The fields are linked by a convergence zone where warm South Pacific waters meet cooler Arctic waters. There, currents and winds carry garbage from one patch to the other. Circular currents move clockwise around the patches, creating a massive vortex that keeps the debris from scattering to other parts of the planet. Unfortunately, all ocean waters have similar pollution problems, and the ocean plastic plague is not limited to the vast Pacific.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch includes two general areas of massed marine debris collected and held in place by ocean currents. Credit: NOAA Marine Debris Program

The GPGP contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of fishing nets, glass, light metals, ropes, and other discarded rubbish. Most GPGP debris is washed out to sea from Asia and North America. Other debris is left behind by boaters, oil rigs, and cargo ships. The majority of this debris is made of plastic, and it gathers in large patches because it floats and much of it is not biodegradable. Most plastics do not wear down or decompose; they simply break into tinier and tinier pieces. 

The GPGP is visible in large swaths on the ocean surface, but much of it exists as microplastics in what appears to be cloudy or milky-colored water. Oceanographers and ecologists recently learned that only a fraction of marine debris floats near the surface, meaning that the deeper waters and sea floors beneath the GPGP are also heavily polluted.

Plastics in particular are a problem because of their omnipresence: they are simply everywhere. Most plastic objects are easy to spot, but plastics exist where you might not expect them: the synthetic chewy polymer in gum, the microbeads in soaps and gels, and even the microfibers of fleece or nylon clothing. Plastics are cheap to manufacture, so cheap, in fact, that many plastics are only used once. Such single-use plastics are the greatest threats to the world’s oceans. People typically use plastic bags, coffee stirrers, forks and spoons, straws, soda and water bottles, and food packaging only once and then throw them away. These items end up in landfills, in lakes and rivers, and in the oceans, and they do harm everywhere. Most of these items can be recycled, but only about 10 percent of plastic is ever reused. Scientists estimate that humans discard about 300 million tons (275 million metric tons) of plastic every year. Of that amount, some 9 million tons (8.1 million metric tons) finds its way into the world’s oceans.

Plastic pollution has a dire effect on marine wildlife, killing hundreds of thousands of fish, sea birds, sea turtles, seals, whales, and other smaller animals each year. Larger animals become entangled in plastic, trapping them or hindering their movement, and they drown or die of starvation. Sea turtles eat plastic bags, mistaking them for their favorite food, jellyfish. The bags suffocate the turtles or kill them by blocking their digestive systems. Sea birds such as albatrosses often mistake plastic resin pellets for fish eggs and feed them to chicks, which then starve or die of ruptured organs. Clouds of microplastics can kill by blocking sunlight: phytoplankton and other types of algae (a large base of the ocean food chain) depend on photosynthesis to survive. Microplastics also effect small fish and carnivorous plankton that mistakenly eat the synthetic particles: the animals either die or pass the plastic up the food chain. Researchers have found high numbers of plastic fibers inside food fish sold at markets—so yes, people too end up eating indigestible and often toxic plastic.

So there is an ocean plastic plague out there, and it is spreading every day: what is being done about it? At sea, unfortunately, little is happening. The GPGP and many other ocean garbage patches around the world lie in international waters. A nation’s territorial waters extend only 12 nautical miles (14 miles or 22 kilometers) from the coast. Most nations observe this limit to regulate commercial fishing, navigation, shipping, and use of the ocean’s natural resources. While some nations claim territorial waters much farther out than 12 nautical miles, none wants the responsibility or expense of cleaning the pollution that collects out there. International waters are exploited and heavily trafficked, but garbage patches are largely ignored beneath the prows of money-making ships.

A tugboat deploys The Ocean Cleanup’s first ocean-sweeping floater to collect plastic marine debris on Sept. 15, 2018. Credit: The Ocean Cleanup

Individual efforts are helping, however. Dutch inventor Boyan Slat recently founded The Ocean Cleanup, an organization that has developed an ocean-sweeping floater to collect plastic garbage. The floater—made from a durable, recyclable plastic called high density polyethylene (HDPE)—is a 1,000-foot- (600-meter- ) long horseshoe that collects plastics in its mouth and in screens that drape beneath the surface. The screens are made from a tightly woven textile impenetrable to marine life, preventing animals from becoming ensnared. The plastics are collected, extracted, and either recycled, resold, or disposed of properly. The floaters will be placed in low-trafficked sea zones, illuminated and equipped with radar and Global Positioning System (GPS) beacons to avoid collisions with ships. The first of these ocean-sweeping floaters began Pacific sea trials in September 2018, and The Ocean Cleanup hopes to have a fleet of 60 such cleaning systems by 2020. The lofty goal is to reduce the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50 percent by 2025.

Other organizations doing what they can to help include the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the Plastic Oceans Foundation. Other inventive forms of cleanup include introducing plastic-eating bacteria (a slow cure that could create other problems) and small scale “SeaBins” that float in harbors and filter out floating garbage. 

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, however, an ounce of prevention is worth of a pound of cure. Stopping the ocean plastic plague—and all other forms of pollution—depends on our habits and behaviors at home. Governments must encourage recycling and develop better waste management systems. Industry must switch to more environmentally friendly plastics capable of natural decomposition. Fishing crews can help by collecting plastic caught in their nets and returning it to shore for processing. Individuals can help by reducing the use of disposable plastics and products with plastic microbeads or microfibers. If plastics must be used, recycle or reuse whenever possible. And, as always and with everything, never litter.

Four members of the first women’s crew to cross the Pacific Ocean—(from left) Natalia Cohen, Emma Mitchell, Laura Penhaul, Meg Dyos. Credit: © Sarah Moshman, Losing Sight of Shore

January 28, 2016

Six British women have given new meaning to the nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” They took 257 days to become the first women’s team—and the first crew rowing four at a time—to complete a journey across the Pacific Ocean. The voyage began in April 2015 in San Francisco, California, and ended 9,600 miles (15,500 kilometers) later in Cairns, Australia, on January 25, 2016.

The crew, whose ages range from 25 to 40, consisted of team leader Laura Penhaul, and team members Natalia Cohen, Emma Mitchell, Isabel Burnham, Lizanne van Vuuren, and Meg Dyos. They rowed 24 hours straight in 2-hour shifts, sleeping 90 minutes at a time.

The boat, named Doris, contained a cabin the size of a two-person tent in which the women ate, washed, and slept. Mitchell commented, “It’s very hot and very sweaty [in the cabin], especially in big waves where we have to keep the hatches closed. It’s kind of like being in a two-man-tent-sized sauna.”

Penhaul, Cohen, and Mitchell each rowed the entire trip, divided into three legs—San Francisco to Hawaii, Hawaii to Samoa, and Samoa to Cairns. Burnham, van Vuuren, and Dyos rowed a leg each, with Dyos completing the foursome on the final leg.

The women had no support crew. They stopped for about one week each in Hawaii and Samoa for supplies and repairs. Otherwise, they were on their own at sea. Each woman consumed about 5,000 calories a day, eating freeze-dried meals with side dishes of protein bars, chocolate, and fruit or nuts, all washed down with desalinated water.

The trip actually took three months longer than expected because of delays during the second leg. The voyage did not lack for discomfort and danger. Drenched by rain and seawater, the women endured painful sores and temperatures so hot they cooked a pancake on the deck using only the heat from the sun’s rays. They also had to survive a tropical storm, waves the height of a house, circling sharks, and a visiting humpbacked whale that surfaced just yards away from their boat. The main concerns included the possibility of overshooting Samoa and running out of food.

The women undertook the expedition to raise money for two British charities—Breast Cancer Care and Walking With the Wounded, which helps retrain wounded veterans returning to civilian life. The rowers videotaped their journey, which will be adapted into a documentary movie called Losing Sight of Shore by filmmaker Sarah Moshman.

The crew summarized their experience, writing the day before their landing in Australia. “It’s fair to say that with physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and a lack of savoury food, we are being tested  to our limits. However, this is where we draw on our SPIRIT, row hard, row strong, row together.”

June 5, 2014

Unusual rocks found on a beach in Hawaii may become long-lasting evidence of the impact humans are having on our planet as well as a marker for the start of a new division of geologic time. The rock is a conglomerate, a rock made up of pebbles, gravel, or the like, held together by a mineral cement. Only in this case, the cement is melted plastic from trash washed or blown ashore. The scientists involved in the rock’s identification have named it plastiglomerate. They also suspect that the new rock can be found along other coasts.

Marine researcher Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Institute in Long Beach, California, found the rock on Kamilo Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. The beach, which is heavily litered with plastic trash, has been called the dirtiest beach in the world. After hearing Moore talk about the rock, geologist Patricia Corcoran and artist Kelly Jazvac of the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in Canada decided to check out the rock for themselves. Their investigations revealed two versions of the new rock. The first, called in-situ plastiglomerate, consists of porous volcanic rocks whose many tiny holes contain melted plastic. The second, more common, kind is called clastic plastiglomerate. It consists of sand, coral, bits of wood, and other debris glued together by melted plastic.

Moore originally thought that the plastic had melted because of lava flows common to the volcanically active Big Island. However, Corcoran and Jazvac discovered that campfires, not lava, were responsible for the plastiglomerate. “It’s so polluted you couldn’t have a campfire there without burning some plastic,” Jazvac told a UWO newsletter. “The quantity is so high that if you’re living near this beach, and you want to live there, what else are you going to do with this material?”

When the scientists analyzed the rock, they found plastic from netting, ropes, and other fishing-related debris; containers and lids; tubes and pipes; and other objects. They suspect the debris came from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” one of the worst regions of plastic pollution in the ocean. The Patch, which lies between California and Japan, is created by spiraling, wind-driven ocean currents carrying trash from coastal waters and other sites throughout the North Pacific.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the area of Texas and contains an estimated 3 million tons (2.7 metric tons) of plastic. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

For future geologists, the plastiglomerate may be marker for the beginning of a new geologic period. Currently, we are living in the Holocene Period, which began 11,500 years ago, with the end of the Ice Age. However, some scientists have suggested establishing a new geologic period called the Anthropocene Period to mark the time during which humans have significantly changed Earth’s natural features and ecosystems. Cocoran’s team believes that plastiglomerate, which is much denser than ordinary plastic, could become buried in the sand and, thus, become part of the rock record. “If someone came along a million years from now, and was looking at a stratigraphic [layered] section through the rock, they would be able to see this plastic along one horizon and say this was the time when humankind was using so much plastic and not disposing of it properly,” Corcoran said.

Additional World Book articles:

• Earth (Age of Earth)
• Geology
• Plastic Planet (a Special Report)

August 9, 2013

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan has directed his government to step in and do whatever is necessary to stabilize the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. His move throws a glaring light on the fact that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has failed to contain nuclear radiation leaks more than two years after a catastrophic triple meltdown caused by an earthquake and tsunami. A magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Japan’s main island, Honshu, on March 11, 2011, knocked out the plant’s cooling systems, triggering blasts at three of six reactors. The earthquake and disaster also left 15,800 people dead and more than 2,600 others missing. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless.

A huge wave strikes Japan's coast on March 11, 2011. An earthquake that day caused a tsunami (series of powerful ocean waves) that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. (© Mainichi Shimbun, Reuters)

According to a government official, as much as 75,000 gallons (284 cubic meters) of  groundwater is believed to be flowing daily downhill through the ruined plant and into a containment pond. In June, TEPCO created a “chemical wall” to line the pond by treating the soil to make it impermeable to water. For a time, the pond contained the contaminated water, but now the water has filled the pond and appears to be flowing over the top of the barrier and into the Pacific Ocean. Nuclear scientists suggest that one solution would be to build a wall of ice around the damaged reactor buildings. This would freeze the surrounding soil, shutting off the flow of groundwater into the plant.

Additional World Book articles:

• Japan 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Reconsidering Nuclear Power (a special report)

March 29, 2012

On March 25, Canadian-born filmmaker and undersea explorer James Cameron became the first person to dive solo to the deepest-known part of the world’s ocean. Cameron, who has directed such films as Aliens (1985), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009), descended to a canyon called the Mariana Trench, which lies nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers) below the surface of the western Pacific Ocean. The area, the lowest-known point of Earth’s crust, is located near the United States Territory of Guam.

James Cameron became the first person to dive solo to the deepest part of the ocean. (Courtesy Jason LaVeris, FilmMagic/Getty Images)

Cameron reached the Mariana Trench in a submersible called Deepsea Challenger. Submersibles are research vessels built to withstand the crushing pressures and near-freezing temperatures found in ocean depths. Deepsea Challenger is a 26-foot- (7.9-meter-) high capsule that descends upright.

According to Cameron, he found the seafloor to be “devoid of sunlight, devoid of any heat, any warmth.” He reported that it was “completely featureless and uniform” and that the only organisms he saw were tiny, shrimp-like arthropods (animals with jointed legs and no backbone). Cameron planned to create a television special for National Geographic and a 3D film for commercial release about his journey. Before Cameron, the only persons to descend into the Mariana Trench were U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and the late Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard, who explored the trench together in the submersible Trieste in 1960.

Although Cameron is best known as a filmmaker, he has made more than 70 ocean dives over the years, including a dozen during the filming of Titanic, a movie about the sinking in 1912 of the largest and most luxurious ocean liner of the day. The Titanic struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage from England to the United States, causing the deaths of more than 1,500 people. The exact whereabouts of the ship remained unknown for decades until a team of French and American scientists led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert D. Ballard found the wreck in the north Atlantic near Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, in 1985 at a depth of about 2.4 miles (3.8 kilometers).

Additional World Book articles:

• Deep into the Past (a special report)
• Deep sea
• Archaeology 1985 (a Back in Time article)
• Ocean 1960 (a Back in Time article)