Perhaps as explorers one day hope to return to the moon, so too might adventurers, and not just robots, revisit the deeps in the future. The Oscar-winning director and undersea explorer said his record-setting expedition to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 7 miles beneath the surface of the western Pacific, not only capped seven. In 1995, the Japanese craft Kaiko reached the bottom, while the Nereus hybrid remotely operated vehicle reached the bottom last year. In addition, in recent years, robots have made the journey back to Challenger Deep. In fact, in 1963, it was used to locate the sunken nuclear submarine USS Thresher. In many ways, the Trieste laid the foundation for the Navy's deep-submergence program. "It's hard to build something that can survive that kind of pressure and have people inside," Sandwell noted. Since then, no man has ever returned to Challenger Deep. To ascend, they magnetically released the ballast, a trip that took 3 hours, 15 minutes. The floor of Challenger Deep seemed to be made of diatomaceous ooze a fine white silt made of microscopic algae known as diatoms.Ī late 1950s artwork, depicting Trieste operating on the deep ocean floor. Hovering in what he's called a vertical torpedo, Cameron is likely collecting data, specimens, and imagery unthinkable in 1960, when the only other explorers to reach Challenger Deep returned. While at the bottom, the explorers not only saw jellyfish and shrimp-like creatures, but actually spied a couple of small white flatfish swimming away, proving that at least some vertebrate life could withstand the extremes of the bottom of the ocean. They actually managed to speak with the craft's mothership using a sonar-hydrophone system at a speed of nearly a mile per second, it still took about seven seconds for a voice message to travel from the craft upward. The two men spent just 20 minutes at the ocean floor, eating chocolate bars for energy in the cold deep, the temperature in the cabin was only 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius). As if to highlight the dangers of the dive, after passing about 27,000 feet (9,000 meters) one of the outer window panes cracked, violently shaking the entire vessel. The descent the first and only manned voyage to the bottom of Challenger Deep took 4 hours and 48 minutes at a rate of about a yard (0.9 meters) a second. "The pressure is tremendous," said geophysicist David Sandwell at the University of California, San Diego, who helped create the first detailed global maps of the seafloor.
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