Earlier this month, researchers have found extraordinary amounts of toxic waste in the bodies of small organisms that live in the Mariana Trench. Researchers have found creatures that are fifty times more toxic than crabs that live in a highly polluted area of China. Other objects have been found in the deepest part of trench, including a can of Spam and other trash.

The world likes to think of the ocean as a place that is untouched and pure, when that simply isn’t the case. One other researcher, Alan Jamieson from Newcastle University, found an alarming amount of POPs (Persistent organic pollutants) in the 2cm- long amphipods that Jamieson looked at from the bottom of the trench. POPs have also been found in the Inuit people in Northern Canada and killer whales in Europe. Another culprit of the pollution are PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls); they were produced from the 1930s to the 1970s. Research found that the Mariana Trench was not the only trench to be affected; the Kermadec trench had the same amount of PCBs as the Marina did. The only other place to match the amount of PCB pollution is in Suruga Bay in Japan; it is a known highly polluted area. Jamieson found that once the POPs get down to the bottom of the trench, there is nowhere else for them to go, so they just sit there until they are consumed by other organisms that live there.

There has been a large amount of research done  on the entire ocean, and awareness has been raised about this issue. Since this research as come to light, governments have banned the use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics. Alan Jamieson is positive that the issues that POPs are causing have been identified and that productions of them have stopped, but the plastic pollution is causing a whole other issue.