A plastic bag filmed at 10,898 meters in the Mariana Trench sat in a Japanese archive for two decades before anyone spotted it. Researcher Sanae Shiba reviewed 5,010 overlooked dives and found more than 3,000 pieces of human waste, with single-use plastic dominating below 6,000 meters.
The water pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench reaches roughly 8 tons per square inch, and sunlight never reaches that depth. The first crewed vessel to arrive there did so in 1960, and the first robotic vehicles capable of returning video footage followed decades later. In 2018, researcher Sanae Shiba avoided the ocean entirely and searched an archive of video instead. She reviewed 5,010…