Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Blue Planet sub leak nightmare in 1,500ft abyss
Crew’s astonishing escape
A BLUE Planet producer has told how she briefly feared for her life when the submersible she was in sprang a leak 1,500ft below the surface.
The pressure kills at that depth and Orla Doherty, who was with a pilot and a cameraman, knew it would take 45 minutes to return from the Antarctic Ocean dive.
She said: “It was far colder than most dives, -1.8C. We noticed water gathering in the bottom. All sorts of things go through your mind. There’s a giant crack and it’s going to go. There isn’t a way out.
“There’s no happy ending. It took 20 minutes to figure out where it was coming from, and how to stop it. That was an exciting 20 minutes.
“An inlet on a pressure gauge wasn’t watertight. It was a case of sealing it. The pilot asked if I wanted to go to the surface and I said no. Every dive is precious.”
Show executive James Honeybourne insisted there was “never a moment of panic”.
He said what they discovered in the second instalment, The Deep, left one expert “gobsmacked”. He added: “No one had dived 1,000
metres deep. Some scientists were saying, ‘it’ll be dead’. We discovered a world richer than we had imagined. That’s so exciting – it’s genuine discovery.”
Humans have viewed less than 1% of the ocean floor, it is thought.
Creatures seen included a Fangtooth, which has the largest teeth in relation to its body of any fish.
Bluntnose sixgill sharks were also on patrol and the team filmed Humboldt squid hunting at 2,624ft – and cannibalism.
In one scene, 16ft sharks fight for their first meal in a year.
Filming took place off the coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Azores, Chile, the Galapagos, Ecuador, the US and Australia.
Producer Mark Brownlow said there were always inherent risks in undersea filmmaking. He said: “But we work with incredible expertise and calculate the risks.”
Blue Planet II is on BBC1 on Sunday at 8pm.