Safety and conservation at the deepest place on Earth: a call for prohibiting the deliberate discarding of nondegradable umbilicals from deep-sea exploration vehicles

Vescovo, Victor L.; Jamieson, Alan J.; Lahey, Patrick; McCallum, Rob; Stewart, Heather A.; Machado, Casey. 2021 Safety and conservation at the deepest place on Earth: a call for prohibiting the deliberate discarding of nondegradable umbilicals from deep-sea exploration vehicles. Marine Policy, 128, 104463. 10.1016/j.marpol.2021.104463

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Abstract/Summary

Exploration vehicles can introduce vast quantities of single-use, plastic-coated tether that have been deliberately discarded as observed at the deepest site of all Earth's oceans. Manned submersible dives to Challenger Deep (10,925 m deep) in the Mariana Trench in 2019 and 2020 revealed hundreds of metres of yellow and white tether strewn across the seafloor. Due to its composition, these fibre-optic tethers will not only persist environmentally, but form a significant risk to equipment and life should unmanned and manned craft become entangled. As a result, the site of the iconic first descent to the deepest place on Earth by Piccard and Walsh in 1960 is unlikely to be safely explored again if this practise continues.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1016/j.marpol.2021.104463
ISSN:	0308597X
Date made live:	15 Mar 2021 11:02 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/529895

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