They must feel very alone. Buried since 8:10 a.m. in their thirteen-centimeter-thick steel coffin, the Swiss Jacques Piccard and the American Don Walsh are sinking inexorably toward the depths of the Mariana Trench, in the heart of the Pacific. On January 23, 1960, the two “savants” sought an absolute record: reaching the deepest point of the earth’s crust, eleven kilometers below the surface.
In the two square meter cabin of the Trieste, the two men feel the pressure building – literally. As their submersible slides towards the abyss, at a constant rate of 0.9 meters per second, the pressure increases on the walls of the cabin. At such depths, a conventional submarine would have been crushed like an aluminum can; their device, designed to withstand more than a thousand times the surface pressure, holds up. “For how much longer?”Walsh and Piccard seem to ask.
Journey to the center of the sea
The prototype bathyscaphe (“boat of the depths”) was invented by Auguste Piccard, Jacques’ father. A brilliant inventor, the latter was familiar with both extreme altitudes and unfathomable depths: in 1931, he was the first man to reach the stratosphereat an altitude of 16,000 meters, in a balloon of his design. It was by drawing on his aeronautical knowledge that the physicist decided to use “ballast” to move the submersible in the ocean (Auguste Piccard also inspired Hergé, creator of Tintin, the character of Professor Tournesol).
At 76 years old, however, the engineer no longer has the energy to embark on such a perilous enterprise. He therefore entrusts command of Trieste to his son Jacques and a US Army lieutenant, Don Walsh, who intends to plant the American flag on a new border in the middle of the Cold War… This is how we find them, on the morning of January 23, for their rendezvous with the abyss. The starting signal is given around 8 a.m. and the crash of the waves soon gives way to the submerged murmur of depths. “By covering the Trieste, the waves sent it into a region of eternal calm, an immense mysterious domain where the fish of the deep open their eager eyes in the darkness”, writes Jacques Piccard.
The trap of the depths
Beyond the threshold of 200 meters depth, the sun’s rays no longer penetrate. The Plexiglas window of the Trieste is visibly blackening. Only the submarine’s searchlights give a hint of visibility to the aquanauts, who can only see a blurred halo of light around them. Thus begins their crossing of the desert, punctuated by the metallic creaking of the device taking on formidable pressure. It lasts four hours and forty-seven minutes.
Around 1 p.m., the onboard sonar indicated that the ocean floor was getting closer. Piccard immediately takes control of his instruments, not wanting the submersible to crash into the ridges that crisscross the Mariana Trench. The slightest crack could result, with pressure of the order of three tonnes per square centimeterby instant death.
Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in the narrow cabin of the Trieste. | Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Finally, the vehicle lands on the bottom of the ocean, on a carpet of soft mud. The depth gauge indicates 11,520 meters: calibrated in Switzerland in fresh water, it somewhat distorts the real results, recorded at 10,900 meters a few years later. Either way, it’s a resounding achievement. In their cabin, where the temperature has dropped to 7°C, the two men exchange a smile. They plunged from a distance greater than the height of Everest into the depths of the Pacific—a feat that seemed, at the time, almost as unattainable as the lunar surface.
-11,000 meters
Nervously, the two aquanauts approach the porthole. Where does their imagination wander at this moment? Do they fear coming face to face with a sea monster, a terrifying mix of tentacles, bulging eyes and sharp teeth? Fortunately, it is a less impressive animal that welcomes them: “At the moment we arrived, we had the immense luck to see, right in the middle of the circle of light brought by one of our projectors, a fish, welcomes Jacques Piccard. Life, in a higher organized form, was therefore possible whatever the depth.”
After twenty minutes of careful exploration – where they also noted the presence of shrimp – the two men released the weight that was holding them to the bottom of the ocean. Finally, the submersible leaves Challenger Deep and begins its race towards the surface. It takes another four hours before the two men see the sunlight again. Thanks to their conclusions, relayed by newspapers around the world, we later refused to use the Mariana Trench as a nuclear waste burial site.
Nine years after this resounding feat, the world has its eyes fixed on another immensity, that of space, touched by the astronauts of Apollo 11. After several years of record dives, Piccard’s bathyscaphe ends its journey in the hangars of the US Navy (it is now on display in a museum in Washington). Little by little, the race for the stars eclipses the odyssey of the depths. Today, we have seen more individuals propelled into space than lost in the abyss and it is estimated that the ocean floors, of which scientists only explored 5%remain more mysterious than the lunar topography.
Source: www.slate.fr
