|
Home > Ocean > Exploring the Deep > The Trieste The Trieste In the wake of World War II and the increasing global tensions of the cold war, the United States’ interests in undersea exploration came to be seen as an urgent priority. It was determined that the ocean depths could be exploited for significant military advantages in the area of undersea communications via sonar (sound waves) and the gathering of intelligence on sunken enemy submarines. It was the U.S. Navy’s drive to gain the upper hand at all costs that fueled the costly construction of the Trieste’s predecessor, the Trieste II. Backed by the considerable capital of the U.S. Navy budget, the Trieste II was designed, built and outfitted for optimal use as military craft that just so happened to be capable of diving to extreme depths. In fact, it was the Trieste II that set the world record for the deepest manned dive in the ocean when it touched bottom in the Marianas Trench, in over 35,000 feet of water in 1951. Jacques Piccard, the son of Auguste, and a Navy submariner, Don Walsh, took that record dive in 1951. It took over four hours to drop to the very bottom of the sea in the Challenger Deep. Can you imagine the fear and tension the two men must have felt as they descended silently for hours into the unblinking darkness, falling into depths no human being alive had been to? How they must have wondered if, and when, the hull of the Trieste II would begin to cave and buckle from the extreme pressure, or if it would implode suddenly and violently without warning? Even at that incredible depth, with unimaginable pressure of 16,000 pounds per square inch and utter blackness, Piccard and Walsh observed living organisms, swimming effortlessly about. Unfortunately, they had no camera with them on that dive, and one of the external lights imploded from the extreme pressures of the deep so that could not have successfully photographed what they saw anyway. Skeptics later criticized Piccard’s observations, claiming that they must have been hallucinating at such a depth, for it seemed impossible that anything could be found living in such inhospitable conditions. So costly and risky was this manned descent into the Challenger Deep that no one has done it since. |
Copyright © 1998-2015. Extreme Science is a registered trademark. All rights reserved. |