Featured Image Credit: NOAA Ocean Exploration
Topics: Environment, Science, Climate Change, Nature, Technology
Emily Brown
Topics: Environment, Science, Climate Change, Nature, Technology
More than 6.7 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies the world’s deepest undersea chasm, and in it scientists made a discovery that left them shocked and disheartened.
Oceanographer Dawn Wright was able to get a rare look at the chasm, known as the Challenger Deep, when she traveled in a submarine to the Mariana Trench in the summer of 2022.
Given that this is an experience not many of us will get to have in our lives, it's easy - and maybe even fun - to imagine what the trench might look like.
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Personally, I'm picturing a mysterious cave-like cavern filled with curious fish and colorful aquatic plants, but unfortunately the reality is much more horrifying.
Wright opened up about her experience in an op-ed written for the Los Angeles Times, in which she explained her plans to explore a previously unvisited area of the trench and use high-resolution sonar to create both an elevation model and a visualization that resembled an aerial photograph,
But even before Wright left the ocean, she saw something sitting in the sediment at the bottom.
It wasn't a fish, an aquatic plant, or even a long-lost shipwreck. It was a beer bottle.
In her op-ed, Wright recalled: "It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact. This discarded trash had managed to reach an unsullied part of our world before we actually did — a symbol of how deeply and irrevocably humans are affecting the natural world."
The harrowing realization that humans really have impacted every little bit of the planet highlighted for Wright the importance of using mapping technology to get to know every nook and cranny of the Earth to help us fully understand not only how it's changing, but also the impacts of those changes.
With the help of geographic information system (GIS) technology, Wright discussed mapping the entirety of the ocean in detail by 2030.
Having detailed insight to the bottom of the ocean floor is vital, she explained, because it will help us understand the patterns in which heat travels through the water, and therefore how it will affect the water above.
Eventually this water will impact the atmosphere and weather, and Wright explained that knowing more about how this heat cycles through the ocean will help us understand when it fuels hurricanes, which are becoming increasingly intense as a result of climate change.