As we explore our planet, the area that is left unexplored is shrinking, that is the land area of course. The oceans and bodies of water on this planet are another case. It has been said that more is known about the surface of the Moon and Mars, than is known about what lies at the bottom of our oceans. Even our deepest diving submarines can get nowhere near the ocean depths, in some spots. That is not to say that there aren't vehicles that can get down there, but they are usually small and slow. Since they are small, they only offer accommodations for a couple of people and take hours to reach full depth. They are not exactly built for sightseeing either. The deep diving subs may have one porthole for viewing, for example. The best views come from the tv cameras attached to the deep diving subs, so it is probably true that a robot deep diving submarine would make more sense to use. I mean, why risk lives when there isn't much to be gained by it? Anyway, the deepest area in the ocean is the Mariana Trench. It was discovered in 1951 by a British ship named Challenger II. The deepest part of the trench is named after the ship. It is called The Challenger Deep.

The trench lies at an incredible depth, and most conventional submarines can only dive to about three hundred meters and most nuclear subs have a limit of about four hundred and fifty meters. Now that we know this, what I am about to tell you sounds even more like fiction. A U.S. Navy submersible manned vessel set a diving record of 35,810 feet. That is about ten thousand nine hundred meters or about twenty four times the depth of a nuclear submarine. The boat was designed by Auguste Piccard and used gasoline to fill the sub's floats. The gasoline was then pumped into the air tanks when the sub was descending and as the sub dove deeper, the pressure compressed the gasoline and the sub sank faster. When the gasoline is in the floats, it is lighter than water, which allows the sub to float. This was a brilliant idea and allowed the sub to reach that tremendous depth in about five hours. Let me add this, you should know that at the bottom of the trench, the pressure on the boat was over sixteen thousand pounds of pressure per square inch.

I don't know how many of you have ever heard the saying that the whole of Earth's environmental change is recorded on the deep sea bottom, but this is what many scientists believe. It is said that there are creatures that exist at these extreme depths, that do not depend on the sun for survival. They use a whole other system and that is usually hot water provided by vents and underwater volcanoes. The trench is actually the boundary between two tectonic plates. The Philippine Plate is one of the plates and it is being forced up by the action of the Pacific Plate, which is pushing under it. If you look at things in a logical way, you can't help but notice that the pressure at the bottom of the trench is over one thousand eighty eight times more than it is on land. You would think that nothing could exist at these depths and yet there is life. We should keep this in the back of our minds, when we start to explore planets. What I mean by that, is that a planet shouldn't be written off as far as life goes, just because of pressure or even excessive heat. Our ocean depths have proved that animals can live in the boiling water of volcanic vents and in crushing pressures. Life adapts.

The trench bottom was reached on 1:06 p.m. on January 23, 1960 by the U.S. Navy boat the Bathyscaphe Trieste. On board the boat were U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard. When the boat hit the bottom of the trench, the onboard systems indicated that they had dove to a depth of 11,521 meters. The depth was revised later to reflect 10,916 meters to be exact, but the record seems to indicate slightly less. I guess the two men were expecting to see no life at the bottom because of the pressures at that depth, but there it was, flounder and shrimp. I guess it would make anyone wonder how these creatures could exist without being crushed, especially since there seemed nothing special about them. The Trieste was built in Italy and is composed of two sections. The boat had operated for several years before the U.S. Navy took interest in it and finally purchased it, for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in 1958. The boat consists of a float chamber and a separate pressure sphere. The pressure sphere that the crew occupied was only 6.5 feet in diameter. This certainly had to be one cramped ride. Two people were able to just squeeze into it.

When the U.S. Navy got the boat, they ordered a new pressure sphere. The new one was built by Krupp Steel Works in Germany and it was able to withstand a pressure of 1.25 metric tons per cubic centimeter. This capability was far more than needed to descend to the trench bottom. In case you wonder what in the world the porthole type viewer could have used that was transparent and yet could withstand such pressures, it was not glass. The only material that was transparent that was found that could do this was Lucite, also known as Plexiglas. It's funny, but quartz lights were used on the outside of the sub to light the area and they were able to withstand the pressure without being modified. The boat was loaded with nine tons of iron pellets to help it descend. The sub was designed in such a way, that if it had an electrical failure, the pellets would be released and the boat would rise automatically. Even though the sub was at the bottom of the trench, it still retained the ability to communicate with the ships above using a sonar hydrophone.

Trieste On The Day Of Record Breaking Dive
Photo Source: US Navy

After spending something like four hours and 48 minutes descending to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Walsh and Piccard only were able to spend about twenty minutes there. The cabin temperature had gone down to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The two men had to eat candy bars to keep their strength up. It must have been quite an experience, one that could only be akin to landing on the Moon, or on some unexplored planet. Here was a place that man had never set foot in before. We learned a lot from this dive. First and foremost was the fact that man could build a machine that could reach these depths. We also learned that life is a lot more resilient than we suspected.