Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
New York led to a new me
Explorer Richard in 36,000ft dive.. after trips to space & Poles
It ruined the memories, I look awful in the holiday pictures & hated myself
EMILY DUGGAN ON HER NEW YORK TRIP
It’s a 4-hour journey to the bottom.. it was a descent into darkness RICHARD GARRIOTT EXPLORER
HISTORY-MAKING explorer Richard Garriott described how he dived to the remotest place on the planet – then took the world’s deepest selfie while down there.
When he gently landed at the foot of the Mariana Trench, Richard became the only man in the world to have flown into space, reached both the North and South Poles and visited “the bottom of the Earth”.
During his 36,000ft Pacific Ocean dive in a British-designed submersible, he filmed tiny translucent creatures scuttling on the ocean floor – but, shockingly, also found rubbish left by a
Chinese expedition.
The British-born entrepreneur said:
“It was a descent into darkness in the truest sense. It’s a four-hour journey to the bottom but you are going down fast. When we got to the bottom I saw this monstrously long cable littering the seafloor. That was very sad.
“On the way back up I saw a siphonophore – a multi-segmented large life form. It looked like a large squid. I feel very privileged to have been at the bottom of the Earth.”
He was almost seven miles underwater – meaning that if you moved Mount Everest onto the sea floor there would still be 1.5 miles to the surface.
Richard, 59, took pictures, posters and poems from young Mirror readers down with him. Many of their schools followed his dive and he is hoping to inspire them to save the planet.
He took photos of the deepest rocks on Earth sitting on the Pacific plate and collected samples for analysis.
And he made a short film down there – just as he did when he was an astronaut on the International Space Station in 2008.
He added: “You can see these nice little four or five inch long translucent black worms. They’re there all over the floor. And you can also see tracks of larger things that are out there.”
Incredibly, he did the whole 12-hour trip without going to the toilet.
He laughed: “I know the kids would be interested in that!”
After his debrief it was time to celebrate becoming the 14th person to officially descend the Trench.
Richard added: “We met on the Sky deck – there was a cooler full of beers and I had a bottle of vodka on ice which was lovely. It was a fantastic end to an incredible day.”