Swiss police can see your proton mail if they get a court to allow viewing it. But the Swiss do not have a submarine, so underwater bottle passing is safe against them.
Combine both, and you are safe! Offline mails in a bottle should be a april fool's RFC any time now.
This is simultaneously depressing and darkly impressive - human pollution has literally reached the deepest point on Earth.
A few thoughts:
1. The preservation at those depths must be incredible. No UV degradation, minimal biological activity, near-freezing temps. That bottle could last centuries or millennia down there.
2. How did it even get there? The Mariana Trench is ~7 miles deep. Did it sink naturally, or was there ocean current transport involved? The logistics of trash reaching that depth are fascinating.
3. What's the microplastic situation? If a whole bottle made it down there, the microplastic concentration must be significant. Are we seeing bioaccumulation in deep-sea organisms?
4. This feels like a modern version of finding Everest's "death zone" littered with oxygen tanks. Humans can't physically reach these places easily, yet our waste gets there anyway.
5. Any monitoring/tracking efforts? Can we trace where this stuff originates? Ocean currents are complex but somewhat predictable.
The sad reality: if we can pollute the Mariana Trench, there's literally nowhere on Earth untouched by human activity. Makes me wonder what the long-term ecological impact will be on these extreme environments.
The bottle in question seems to be glass, so many of those questions aren't really relevant. Glass doesn't degrade much from UV light, or at all from biological activity, whether on land or under 7 miles of ocean. Glass is denser than water, so it sank.
Because it's an LLM spambot, it "saw" a couple of keywords and wrote a comment that's vaguely relevant to the article at hand. Do help with kicking it out by flagging its comments.
When it comes to exploring the deep sea, unless you suffer from thalassophobia (the fear of large bodies of water), it can be quite fascinating.
What purpose does this serve, other than to introduce a word that has no future relevance in the article. It’s just an empty sentence padding the word count.
Solids and liquids mostly don’t compress so as a general rule most can handle those pressures without experiencing any real mechanical stress, as they instantly provide a perfectly matching internal pressure that balances out the forces to zero.
It’s mostly things that contain gases that can get crushed by high pressure. Almost any type of closed cell foam for example, will either collapse to a small size or crack and crumble apart depending on how rigid it is.
Living things tend to get harmed by pressure changes because they have compressible gasses and/or biological compartments that contain things that experience phase changes between gas and liquid at different pressures.
Even so, wouldn't you expect that you could crush an open empty beer bottle by putting a heavy enough weight on it? A human can't do it, but I would expect an elephant can.
There is quite a lot of pressure put outside from the beer of a full bottle, but that little bit of air is probably enough to cause it to implode at some point.
I'll be honest; I have no idea how to estimate that. I'm sure there are folks on here who can (and might). It's probably not as deep as you'd think.
I have a feeling someone dropped this bottle on purpose when they were over the trench. They knew what they were doing. Note the lack of other littler.
I don't see any ads on Firefox (Android) with uBlock Origin.
That site seems horrible though. Random words in the body like reddit are hyperlinks to SEO landing pages on the same site. And there must be a better (original) source for the story than this...
You should really use an ad blocker. The Internet is basically unusable these days without one. I block ad domains at the DNS level too, but the ad blocker is still necessary to remove the empty frames left, sad.
For years we were told trans-oceanic communication was best done with messages in bottles and suddenly even those are being intercepted.
Finally time to switch to protonmail.
Depends on your thread model:
Swiss police can see your proton mail if they get a court to allow viewing it. But the Swiss do not have a submarine, so underwater bottle passing is safe against them.
Combine both, and you are safe! Offline mails in a bottle should be a april fool's RFC any time now.
It'd be surprising if we found it on the moon, but how is it surprising that something fell 7 miles until it hit the floor
2020 Commercial submarine trips to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (103 points, 66 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702000
2019 Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag (169 points, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19899374
2019 In Mariana Trench, every animal tested had plastic in its gut (57 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19302531
2018 Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench (359 points, 326 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17057305
What’s the chance this was dropped off one of the research vessels at some point? It seems unlikely to drift given it sank to the bottom.
Time for a remake of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" with octopi.
octopodes
This is simultaneously depressing and darkly impressive - human pollution has literally reached the deepest point on Earth.
A few thoughts:
1. The preservation at those depths must be incredible. No UV degradation, minimal biological activity, near-freezing temps. That bottle could last centuries or millennia down there.
2. How did it even get there? The Mariana Trench is ~7 miles deep. Did it sink naturally, or was there ocean current transport involved? The logistics of trash reaching that depth are fascinating.
3. What's the microplastic situation? If a whole bottle made it down there, the microplastic concentration must be significant. Are we seeing bioaccumulation in deep-sea organisms?
4. This feels like a modern version of finding Everest's "death zone" littered with oxygen tanks. Humans can't physically reach these places easily, yet our waste gets there anyway.
5. Any monitoring/tracking efforts? Can we trace where this stuff originates? Ocean currents are complex but somewhat predictable.
The sad reality: if we can pollute the Mariana Trench, there's literally nowhere on Earth untouched by human activity. Makes me wonder what the long-term ecological impact will be on these extreme environments.
The bottle in question seems to be glass, so many of those questions aren't really relevant. Glass doesn't degrade much from UV light, or at all from biological activity, whether on land or under 7 miles of ocean. Glass is denser than water, so it sank.
Because it's an LLM spambot, it "saw" a couple of keywords and wrote a comment that's vaguely relevant to the article at hand. Do help with kicking it out by flagging its comments.
I would be more surprised if stuff like that would not find its way to places like that.
I would like to see some movie like unresponsible guy throws his bottle to somewhere than some natural power moves it.
Isn’t that The Gods Must Be Crazy?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/
This is an incredible film
And it's not like there is anything (other than submersibles) that might cause it to find its way out again.
The article mentions thalassophobia, which is my new vocabulary word for today. It means fear of large bodies of water.
Fear of the sea not large bodies of water.
Thalassa! Thalassa!
(Homeric reference there.)
I found that to be really bad writing
What purpose does this serve, other than to introduce a word that has no future relevance in the article. It’s just an empty sentence padding the word count.Perhaps it was tossed overboard by somebody on the support vessel...
different source that loads without javascript https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/12/oceanographe...
(lacking details on the bottle itself)
I'm curious what objects do/don't survive at the water pressure. I guess bottles are strong enough
Solids and liquids mostly don’t compress so as a general rule most can handle those pressures without experiencing any real mechanical stress, as they instantly provide a perfectly matching internal pressure that balances out the forces to zero.
It’s mostly things that contain gases that can get crushed by high pressure. Almost any type of closed cell foam for example, will either collapse to a small size or crack and crumble apart depending on how rigid it is.
Living things tend to get harmed by pressure changes because they have compressible gasses and/or biological compartments that contain things that experience phase changes between gas and liquid at different pressures.
Presumably it was open & empty, so it's just a piece of glass surviving...
Even so, wouldn't you expect that you could crush an open empty beer bottle by putting a heavy enough weight on it? A human can't do it, but I would expect an elephant can.
The pressure inside the bottle is the same as the outside. So it’s not the same as stomping on an empty bottle.
There is quite a lot of pressure put outside from the beer of a full bottle, but that little bit of air is probably enough to cause it to implode at some point.
I'll be honest; I have no idea how to estimate that. I'm sure there are folks on here who can (and might). It's probably not as deep as you'd think.
But the forces are the same all around the bottle (again assuming it is open)
That's not how pressure works if it's opened. The forces balance out
The bottle wouldn't be empty though.
I have a feeling someone dropped this bottle on purpose when they were over the trench. They knew what they were doing. Note the lack of other littler.
But did they pick it up?
Not worth it for the $0.10 return. Put more down there to incentivize.
Scientists [ad] discover [ad] beer [ad] [popup] [ad] bottle in [ad] the [ad] [ad] [ad]
Painful
I don't see any ads on Firefox (Android) with uBlock Origin.
That site seems horrible though. Random words in the body like reddit are hyperlinks to SEO landing pages on the same site. And there must be a better (original) source for the story than this...
https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/blog/articles/mission-...
Seems like this is better, or at least maybe a primary source?
It's peak content form that AI was trained on and is now writing itself.
You should really use an ad blocker. The Internet is basically unusable these days without one. I block ad domains at the DNS level too, but the ad blocker is still necessary to remove the empty frames left, sad.
I agree it's something of a bummer, but why is this surprising or "bizarre"?
Literal navalgazing