ROVs Discover Deep Sea Trash

An anonymous reader writes "Deep beneath the ocean's waves, strange creatures such as rockfish and gorgonian coral thrive in the icy depths. Yet there's something else you'll find if you go searching beneath the sea: trash, and lots of it. Researchers have discovered that our trash is accumulating in the deep sea, particularly in Monterey Canyon off of the coast of California. Scientists knew that trash was affecting shallower depths--about 1,000 feet beneath the water. Yet they were unsure whether the effects extended to the truly deep parts of the ocean that reached up to 13,000 feet. They decided that there was only one way to find out: look for themselves."

Comments

Re:it'll be there for a while, too

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I have no objections agains that. I even contemplated whether it wouldn't be useful to sweep the Great Pacific garbage patch with some kind of automated vessels. You know, all the floating plastic that is actually photodecomposing into toxic chemicals as we speak. Plastic actually *can* be decomposed into light hydrocarbons with thermal depolymeration.

Aluminum cans are obviously low-hanging fruit, but it's much cheaper to collect them as early after being emptied as possible rather then to scour them from the depths of the ocean.

One major difference

[Viol8]

When a ship is deliberately sunk to create a reef ALL the volatiles and potentially toxic substances are removed. Basically all you are left with is iron and a few other metals which are enviromentally benign and are oxidised back to the minerals they came from in a few hundred years.. A shoe however is full of glues, polymers and other man made substances which could take literally millenia to decompose and poison the enviroment in the meantime.