Voyage to the bottom of the sea
It’s the f inal frontier of exploration, visited by fewer people than the Moon. Last week the MoS watched history being made as this tiny sub took passengers on 12-hour trips to the deepest depths of the Pacif ic – ELEVEN kilometres under the sea. They fo
A journey to Earth’s final oceanic frontier
THE SHINY white diving sub bounces and bobs in the Pacific Ocean as the water stretches out vast and blue as far as my eyes can see. For a few minutes the vessel rocks in the waves and then it is gone, descending 11km through the ocean depths to the bottom of the sea.
Perched on the edge of an inflatable dinghy, I look down in awe as the $35m capsule drops silently through the crystal-clear waters before, finally, it disappears into darkness.
Four hours later, back aboard the support ship, the DSSV Pressure Drop, the faint voice of the sub’s pilot, explorer Victor Vescovo, crackles over the radio to announce that he and passenger Kelly Walsh have reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the base of what is ominously called the ‘hadal zone’ after Hades, Greek god of the underworld. Dubbed ‘the final frontier of exploration’, it is so deep that if you placed Mount Everest at its base, the mountain’s peak would still be 7,000ft below sea level.
Vescovo’s voice has taken seven seconds to travel through the 11km vertical wall of water between sub and ship.
The titanium sphere he and Kelly are sitting in is being subjected to 100,000 tons of pressure, the equivalent of the weight of 291 fully loaded jumbo jets or 7,900 double-decker buses.
‘Welcome to the future,’ grins expedition leader Rob McCallum. ‘You’ve just witnessed history being made. This is the first and only submersible that can go to full ocean depth and back repeatedly and safely. In terms of technology, it’s the equivalent of making a daily flight into orbit.
‘Man knows so little about life at these depths so we’re essentially a pathfinder off to explore the final and most forbidding frontier on Earth.’
The Mail on Sunday last week became the only news outlet invited to join the thrilling ‘Ring of Fire’ expedition to the Mariana Trench and its deepest point, Challenger Deep.
While only 12 people have walked on the Moon, until last week they still outnumbered those who had been to the bottom of the world.
Days before I arrive, former Nasa astronaut Kathy Sullivan was the first woman to go down there, making her the world’s first astronaut-turnedaquanaut. She called it a ‘magical’ experience, saying: ‘As we glided along the ocean floor… moonscape was the word that kept coming to me, like I was seeing the Moon right here on our own planet.’
During my two-week adventure, the sub made multiple dives into the abyss to study the topography of the trench and the creatures that live in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
A high-tech sonar system mapped Challenger Deep’s western, central and eastern ‘pools’ in detail for the first time to reveal that they undulate with slopes and piles of rocks above a bed of primordial ooze containing life forms never before seen by the human eye.
Depressingly, we also saw a red, fizzy drinks can and piles of thin, discarded plastic cable – proving that man has even managed to pollute this hidden part of our planet.
History was made by sending down Kelly Walsh, the 52-year-old son of Don Walsh, the first man to reach Challenger Deep in 1960. It made the Walshes the first father/ son team to repeat an epic exploration ‘first’ (the equivalent would be Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong’s son going to the Moon).
On another dive, Vescovo was accompanied by Ying-Tsong Lin, a 45-year-old acoustics specialist from Taiwan – a political statement directed at its aggressive neighbour China, which had hoped – but failed – to send a manned sub to such depths.
And Vescovo, who has now been to the Mariana Trench eight times, also took down the first ‘expedition sponsor’, US businessman Jim Wigginton, 71, who paid $750,000 for the privilege.
Getting to one of the most remote places on Earth was an adventure in itself.
I left my home in Los Angeles in the early hours of Sunday, June 14, flying via San Francisco to Honolulu
and then on to Guam (crossing the international date line) to arrive the following night to meet the ship – a distance of 9,800km.
The 225ft Deep Submergence Support Vessel (DSSV) Pressure DropGraham was built in 1985 by the US Navy to hunt Russian submarines and is now owned by Vescovo, a pony-tailed 6ft 1in Texan who made his fortune in private equity before using his wealth to fund his love of exploration.
Sitting in the ship’s mess, surrounded by movie posters including one for 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the 1954 film of the Jules Verne book that inspired his passion for adventure, the 54-yearold explains why he believes, like Elon Musk with his SpaceX project, the future of exploration rests in
It was just magical, like seeing the Moon right here on our own planet
Who knows, the cure for cancer could be sitting there in the depths
the private sector. Vescovo called his ship and subs after ship names in the sci-fi novels by the late British writer Iain M. Banks. He says: ‘I couldn’t believe no one had built a reusable sub capable of exploring the full ocean depths. Oceans cover nearly threequarters of the Earth’s surface yet more than 80% of them remain unexplored. We know more about the Moon than about what is here beneath the waves of our own planet.
‘Until relatively recently it was thought the bottom of the ocean was barren. But it’s full of life – just not life as we know it. There are micro-organisms and creatures that have evolved to survive in the harshest conditions imaginable. Who knows what secrets they hold? The cure for cancer could be sitting there in the depths.’
Human knowledge of the oceans has been concentrated in the top 650ft, the so-called epipelagic zone, where there is enough light for photosynthesis. But that’s just 5% of the ocean’s volume.
The 335km journey from Guam to the Mariana Trench takes 24 hours. Warm trade winds fan the decks, interrupted by sudden violent tropical squalls. We see the
occasional bird (Brown boobies and Bulwer’s petrels) and a whale shark. Iridescent flying fish skim over the waves. The area is so remote I see no other vessel in two weeks.
Rob McCallum, co-founder of EYOS Expeditions, a British company based in the Isle of Man that arranged the first tourist dives to the Titanic, describes Vescovo as a ‘once in a lifetime client’ who is ‘comfortably wealthy but not billionaire rich’.
His 12-ton submarine, called Limiting Factor, was the brainchild of John Ramsay, who came up with the revolutionary design at home in Devon. It was built by Florida-based Triton Submarines.
Vescovo’s childlike enthusiasm brims over as we walk on to the deck where the sub sits encased in its own hangar and is lovingly attended to by a team from Triton. Made from a 90mm-thick titanium sphere encased in a buoyant filler comprised of millions of hollow glass spheres, the sub looks like something out of a James Bond film.
From the outside it resembles a futuristic handbag. There are three windows, two across and one lower down, which give it an otherworldly ‘face’.
Vescovo confides that he sees it as a woman: ‘She’s quiet, reliable and very, very tough.’
We clamber up an external ladder and take off our shoes. I squeeze my body through the hatch and down a precipitous set of stairs before manoeuvring around to sit in one of two leather seats inside the hull, which is just 5ft-wide.
It’s like being inside a spaceship, although Vescovo likens it to flying a helicopter because 10 thrusters allow it to move vertically and horizontally.
Oxygen cylinders sit above the control panel. A wall of switches fills the area between our seats. There are filters to remove carbon monoxide from the air – screens to show images from the external highdefinition cameras.
‘It’s a mini life-support system. Like anything in life, you have to weigh the risk versus return. But I have complete faith in the sub and my team,’ says Vescovo.
Is he scared of death? ‘If something catastrophic happens and the hull implodes, which I don’t think it ever will, it would be so fast I wouldn’t know anything. I’ll be liquified.
‘We have emergency measures for everything else – fire, entanglement. I can drop weights to move rapidly to the surface. We check in with the surface ship every 15 minutes. If I become incapacitated, there is a dead man’s switch. An alarm goes off and if I don’t respond to the alarm, the weights automatically drop.
‘There are duplicate systems in case of battery failure. Thrusters can be ejected if they get tangled up in something.’
Vescovo’s first dive to the Challenger Deep, when he recorded a depth of 35,843ft, triggered a pointed response from the director of the film Titanic, James Cameron. Eight years ago, Cameron became the third man after Don Walsh and the Swiss oceanographer Auguste Piccard (who together went down in a bathyscaphe, which is suspended beneath floats, in 1960) to reach a depth of 35,787ft in the Challenger Deep.
Cameron carped at his rival for claiming to have gone deeper, saying ‘You can’t go deeper. It’s flat and featureless in the Challenger Deep.’ Vescovo shrugs off the criticism: ‘I’ve now made eight dives, taken hours of footage and I can assure you it’s not flat. My answer is to produce a ton of hard data. I’m not in this for fame or celebrity. I’m doing this because it’s the purest form of exploration.’
He invited Cameron to join this expedition, to dive alongside him, but never received a reply.
Excitement is palpable as the sub is prepared for a dive.
Its first was on Saturday, June 20 when Kelly Walsh made history by following in his dad’s footsteps.
Kelly says: ‘I grew up with my father’s stories. For Dad, it was never about medals or records – just about exploration and science.
‘It was the same time as the race into space. Space was always considered sexier. Deep ocean exploration was ignored.’
Referring to the book The Right Stuff, about early space flight, he adds: ‘Dad always joked he did “the right stuff in the wrong direction”.’ Dive day begins at 5am with the launch of two robotic ‘landers’, deployed to help the sub navigate the bottom.
The landers also collect rock and soil samples and have cameras to record ethereal snailfish and new species of crustaceans.
Launching the submersible is an industrial ballet.
First, it’s rolled out from a protective canopy to the edge of the deck. Attached to a hook, it is lowered into the waves before being detached… and then it is gone. The journey lasts 12 hours – four hours down, four hours on the bottom and four hours back.
Loaded with heavy weights, it falls at a rate of 180ft per minute.
To return to the surface, it
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