A photo from an opinion piece, written in 2022 for the Los Angeles Times by Dawn Wright, has been attracting attention on news feeds lately as a sad reminder that carelessly tossed litter can turn up anywhere, no matter how remote the location.

Wright, a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University (among many other accomplishments), is one of the few people who has visited Challenger Deep — the deepest seabed on earth, located in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench — in a two-seat submarine called Limiting Factor.

While describing the miles-deep seafloor mapping mission with Victor Vescovo in 2022, she cautioned: “The dive … gave me a close-up view of something else, sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle.

“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.” (Photo: Caladan Oceanic)