The Mariana trench in the northern Pacific is one of the most remote places on earth, but scientists say that the organisms that live there are heavily contaminated with industrial pollutants.
“At its deepest — about 7 miles down — the water in the trench is near freezing. The pressure would crush a human like a bug,” says NPR. Yet when scientists took samples from the area they found amphipods — shrimplike creatures — that were polluted with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)s, along with other chemicals.
“Every sample we had,” says biologist Alan Jamieson of Newcastle University in England, “had contaminants in it at very high or extraordinarily high levels.”
Some of the amphipods were 50 times more contaminated than crabs in waters fed by one of China’s most polluted rivers, says NPR. The pollutants seem to float to the bottom of the ocean much the same way dust collects under a bed, pulled down by gravity, and Mariana trench is as deep as they come. Scientists say the discovery is alarming because it means that even more of the world’s creatures are impacted by humans and often in places that we didn’t expect.