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Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag
- erentz 7y agoInstead of anthropocene we might be better to call the current era the plastocene.
- bdamm 7y agoWith some previously non-existent radioactive elements mixed in for good measure. This layer of plastic, radioactivity, and airliner exhaust will be forever buried in the geologic record at every point on the earth. What fun!
- linuxftw 7y agoDo you think the geological record might indicate a type of 'evolution and migration' of plastics across the globe?
- rtkwe 7y agoNot sure it will because it's a very short time period that plastics have existed geologically speaking and the time periods found in rock/soil/ice are generally pretty imprecise until we can relate them to something like tree rings that show precise year cycles where there's a large event like a fire that shows up in both the rock/soil layer and in trees. Generally without large anchoring events like that the best we get is very large time frames for events and mostly in relation to other events in the local area where you can measure forwards and backwards (up and down in the rock formation) relative to other events.
- growlist 7y ago> forever buried in the geologic record That's somewhat of a contradiction in terms, depending on your timescale!
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoMy friend once joked that some future civilization will discover plastic and think it's a natural resource.
- BrandonMarc 7y agoIf fossil fuels are the detritus of extinct plants, then plastic is just as "natural" as coal and oil ... in either case, it's a waste/byproduct of a life form/ecosystem that no longer exists.
- arestifo 7y agoPlastic reached where humans never managed to. Great, just great.
- geddy 7y agoI think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not. Within a year of us being gone the planet will take over everything we ever owned. Weeds will break through the streets and house foundations, and in a decade or so (blink of an eye in Earth time) it'll be like we were never here. Well except for all the garbage we left behind. But even that will become food for something.
- wolfram74 7y agoThere are a number of all clay or stone structures that have been around for centuries/millenia. I think they'd survive a few decades without maintenance, but for the most part I agree with you.
- mirceal 7y agoin the grand scheme of things, humans and what we have produced is nothing. Given enough time everything will be decomposed. On in the words of a great comedian: "the planet is fine, people are f'ed" My worry is that we will transform Earth into a landfill and in desperation we will search (and find) another planet to trash. Humans are very very creative when it comes to survival. Only a fraction of people alive will make it to the new planet. Rinse and repeat.
- bazooka_penguin 7y agoPlastic bags are the cthulu we've always been expecting to find deep in the ocean
- gedy 7y agoI’m old enough to remember being berated by a family member for using paper bags instead of plastic bags because, quote: “Plastic is recyclable!”
- gerbilly 7y agoIronic because paper bags are recyclable, and nature does it for free!
- giarc 7y agoAnalysis has shown plastic bags are actually better for the environment than paper bags. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-plastic-bag-bans-garbage https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...
- imgabe 7y ago> A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. This seems disingenuous. 131 uses of a cotton tote bag doesn't replace 1 plastic bag, it replaces at least 131 plastic bags, if not 2-3x that amount since the tote bags are bigger and sturdier and hold more. I think the fundamental problem with plastic bags is that since they are 1 or 2 use, they are always going to be entering the environment at a rate faster than they degrade. So there is going to be an ever-increasing buildup of plastic bags in the environment for as long as they go on being used.
- lohszvu 7y agoUsed once is referring to plastic bags used to hold groceries and then immediately thrown out. (Not used more than once: ie a garbage bag, pick up dog poop, etc) So it is comparing 1 reusable bag used 131 times to 131 plastic bags. Further in the article another study considers plastic bags used more than once, which are much better for the environment. >I think the fundamental problem with plastic bags is that since they are 1 or 2 use, they are always going to be entering the environment at a rate faster than they degrade. So there is going to be an ever-increasing buildup of plastic bags in the environment for as long as they go on being used. I think it is much more important to look at scientific studies than what a random person hypothesizes with no evidence to back it up.
- otabdeveloper1 7y agoTrash flows downstream. Not very surprising.
- hawkjo 7y agoThe most exciting news is that they made several extremely deep dives in quick succession, advancing the way to a future of regular deep sea exploration. Congrats to the team!
- mc32 7y agoDo you think this has the potential to result technologies allowing the exploitation (extraction) of deep sea natural resources (i.e. minerals and metals)? It seems people are more excited by exploiting the Moon for resources, but deep sea should be more economical once extraction tech is figured out.
- Konnstann 7y agoI'd rather exploit the moon, to the best of my knowledge nothing lives there, and I doubt we'd make a large enough dent to affect tides or other moon-related events.
- steve_adams_86 7y agoPeople thought we couldn't make a dent in the ocean's resources too. My gut tells me there'll always be some sort of catch...
- mc32 7y agoThe Moon is nice, but for Earth usage, extracting on the Moon seems like it would be more energy expensive than on Earth, no?
- whoopdedo 7y agoHas anyone made a good guess at what the true purpose of these dives is? I'm not unconvinced this isn't another expedition in the line of Ballard or Glomar Explorer.
- wtdata 7y agoPlastic became so spread out in nature that I don't think it will aver be possible to clean the planet up from it using traditional methods anymore. I think only a bioengineered microorganism that can breakup plastics into other biodegradable components will be able to clean up our mess. Either that, or wait some millions of years for it to show up naturally: http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2014/7/11/how-fungi-saved-the-world http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2014/7/11/how-fungi-saved...
- swarnie_ 7y agoReading the comments here is a bit scary. Is taking the same 4-5 plastic bags back to the supermarket each week not super common everywhere?
- rohit2412 7y agoOr cloth bags. Seriously, they are stronger, hold more stuff and hurt less because of sharp edges. All you need to do is just carry them
- athenot 7y agoEven better are foldable bins made of cloth—I think mine are reinforced with cardboard or semi-hard plastic inside. They stay open when loading with groceries, and don't roll around in the trunk of the car.
- CelestialTeapot 7y agoI use cloth bags, too. But, ignoring the marine dumping problem, cloth bags can be the worst.[1] You would need to reuse each thousands of times to be worth using over LDPE bags. 1. https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-might-be-worse-than-plastic/ https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...
- A2017U1 7y agoThat's more an indictment of cotton than reusable bags. Other materials are fine.
- ForHackernews 7y agoNot in America, it's not.
- gambiting 7y agoOf course not. I don't know where you live that it is. Where I'm from(Poland) you'd commonly go to a shop without any bags and just pack everything into single use plastic bags every time and then just throw them away. It's only started changing recently since shops started charging money for bags, but I don't recall ever going to a shop with our own bags for shopping - I think I'd even go as far as say that it would be weird to do so.
- 7373737373 7y agoIs there a list of governments, companies and other organizations that documents how much waste they direct into the sea? Or is the majority of it individual people littering?
- dfilppi 7y agoCool. That would be a good place to stick plastic bags.
- wnissen 7y agoYou're picturing plastic waste in the oceans wrong. Most of it comes from fishing gear that's abandoned or lost, not disposal of waste like plastic bags. In total 80-90% come from Asian and African countries with poor environmental policies. https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-plastic-pollution-worlds-oceans-13233 https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-pl... For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc. I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom of the Marinara trench.
- nicoburns 7y ago> but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled That's definitely not true in the UK. A lot of our "recycling" has been being shipped to China until recently. I believe that other countries have been doing that too.
- steve_adams_86 7y agoIt's hard to define "safely" landfilled as well. Many places still leak out toxic leachate into water tables due to a lack of barriers on the landfill. They also severely disrupt large tracts of land. They also vent off tremendous amounts of methane. There isn't much safe about most landfills out there.
- wnissen 7y agoTrue, there is a lot of variety there. Around here everything is properly lined and the water table monitored for various poisons, but that's not true everywhere. The methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and I see little progress on that, even in eco-conscious California. Composting more or less eliminates the methane but I see maybe half of the households in our neighborhood putting out a green waste cart. Global warming is really the problem, and I will admit to being a huge hypocrite on that. I drive about half the average American's 13.5K miles / 21.K 7km, but fly a lot, probably 20K miles / 32K km. Sigh.
- JTbane 7y agoThere ought to be a principle that packaging is evaluated on how much harm a 'careless' disposal would cause: even though a paper bag takes many times more energy to produce than a plastic one, it causes less harm when disposed of by dumping.
- nealrs 7y agoI believe we've known about plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana Trench since [1998](http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp/JEDI_KAIKO0073_00010V?lang=en http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp...)
- sjclemmy 7y agoThe best thing about this is that the vessels’ names are inspired by Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/names/ https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/names/
- Dirlewanger 7y agoWhat are you talking about? No one actually needs single-use plastics; they're a wholly unnecessary, superfluous byproduct of consumer capitalism. Unless there's some medical applications I'm not aware of, the world would be a better place if most single-use plastics disappeared tomorrow.
- dang 7y agoWe've asked you many times to stop being uncivil in HN comments. If you don't stop, we are going to have to ban you. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902164 and marked it off-topic.
- kyrieeschaton 7y agoSingle use plastics (eg diapers, syringes, many dressings, nitrile gloves, surgical tubing, surgical sutures, saline bags, and so on) are a primary medical supply.
- fjp 7y agoWhile you are correct, I do believe that these feel-good campaigns distract from the corporate polluters that cause the vast vast majority of these problems. If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to the real villains.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago> If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to the real villains. Plastic straws are a negligible fraction of plastic pollution, but they represent much more than that. Viral attention on plastic straws serves as a convenient lever by which the broader topic of environmental stewardship is pushed to the forefront of peoples' minds, indirectly achieving the goal of cleaning up the world. At least, that's what I hope, not what I expect. Sure, some people will react with supercilious contempt at the hordes of selectively ignorant masses signalling virtue with their social-media images of strawless drinks. It's not like their personal choices are saving turtles, let alone the oceans. But this misses the point: the anti-straw campaign reminds entire populations that people collectively throw away too much plastic, and that things need to change -- at all levels, from the individual upward.