Oct 4, 2017 08:54 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ds/530655/
EXCERPT: [...] PCBs had been detected in Hirondellea gigas, tiny shrimp-like amphipods scooped up by deep-water trawlers. Results from the expedition, led by Newcastle University’s hadal zone expert Alan Jamieson, were preliminary released last year and then published in February.
PCBs have been found the world over—from the bed of the Hudson River to the fat of polar bears roaming the high Arctic—but never before in the creatures of the extreme deep, a bioregion about which science knows relatively little.
PCBs live on in some of the deepest waters of Earth’s biggest ocean.
How PCBs reached the Mariana is still under investigation. Jamieson and colleagues speculated on multiple, regional sources. A nearby military base. The industrial corridors along the Asian coastline. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where PCBs glom onto plastic particles caught in the current. Over time, the plastic degrades and descends into the depths, ferrying PCBs with them.
But the true origin of PCBs lies in another time and place, in Depression-era Alabama, and before that, 19th-century Germany at the pinnacle of German chemistry....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ds/530655/
EXCERPT: [...] PCBs had been detected in Hirondellea gigas, tiny shrimp-like amphipods scooped up by deep-water trawlers. Results from the expedition, led by Newcastle University’s hadal zone expert Alan Jamieson, were preliminary released last year and then published in February.
PCBs have been found the world over—from the bed of the Hudson River to the fat of polar bears roaming the high Arctic—but never before in the creatures of the extreme deep, a bioregion about which science knows relatively little.
PCBs live on in some of the deepest waters of Earth’s biggest ocean.
How PCBs reached the Mariana is still under investigation. Jamieson and colleagues speculated on multiple, regional sources. A nearby military base. The industrial corridors along the Asian coastline. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where PCBs glom onto plastic particles caught in the current. Over time, the plastic degrades and descends into the depths, ferrying PCBs with them.
But the true origin of PCBs lies in another time and place, in Depression-era Alabama, and before that, 19th-century Germany at the pinnacle of German chemistry....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ds/530655/