Secrets of the sea [antikvár]

The Last Great Frontier 1At dawn on January 23, 1960, two men embarked on one of the most perilous journeys ever undertaken. Locked inside a steel sphere aboard the U.S. Navy's bathyscaph (deep-sea submersible) Trieste, Jacques Piccard and Donald Walsh set out to plunge through 3 5,800 feet of ocean in the deepest-known spot on earth. No one knew what they would find there, or whether they would come back alive.The Trieste pitched and rolled on a stormy sea, watched by the anxious crews of two U.S. Navy escort ships. Far below them lay Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, a huge crescent-shaped gorge in the floor of the western Pacific Ocean. Inside their strange craft, in a space three feet across and less than six feet high, Piccard and Walsh waited, their eyes fixed on the depth gauge.At 8:23 a.m. the signal came. The Trieste began to drop into the silence of the depths. It took nearly 40 minutes to reach 800 feet, but at 9 a.m. Piccard accelerated the rate of descent. First they passed through a twilight zone. Then darkness. Piccard flicked on the forward beam. As he peered into the sea, a flurry of tiny marine creatures streamed past.Deep in the heart of the ocean, the two men were very much alone. A telephone provided their only link with the surface. This contact was reassuring. But Piccard and Walsh were far beyond the reach of assistance."9:20, depth 2,400 feet," reported Piccard. "Outside, totál blackness. . . . We have entered the abyssal zonethe timeless world of eternal darkness." A chili penetrated the sphere as the temperature dropped rapidly. Thousands of tons of pressure from the surround-ing sea gripped the descending craft. At 4,200 feet, the men were alarmed to see a thin trickle of water seeping in.Black water rushed past as the Trieste shot on downward at 180 feet per minute. Piccard noticed with relief that the leak had stopped. At 20,000 feet the sphere began to plunge into the deepest ocean trench in the world.At 29,150 feet Piccard noted "a vast emptiness beyond all com-prehension." With perhaps a mile or more still to go, he wasLeft: Donald Walsh (right) and Jacques Piccard in the bathyscaph Trieste after diving to the deepest-known part of the sea. They descended 35,800 feet, or nearly seven miles, into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.