British adventurer conquers Earth’s extremes

From outer space to the ocean’s deepest chasm, Richard Garriott has seen the planet’s four ‘corners’

‘You sit tight for a fourhour long descent into the dark. You’re going a mightily long distance and the sub is moving quickly’

‘It was a very exciting dive and I feel very privileged to have been at the bottom of the Earth’

A BRITISH explorer has become the first person to visit Earth’s four furthest extremes after a successful dive to the deepest point in the ocean.

Cambridge-born Richard Garriott has now completed the incredible “quartet” of flying in space, hiking to both North and South Poles and reaching the bottom of the world in a titanium submersible.

The 59-year-old computer game entrepreneur emerged on Monday after his descent nearly seven miles below the Pacific Ocean’s surface to its deepest point, known as Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench. To put its depth into perspective, Mount Everest’s peak is just 5.5 miles high. The Mariana Trench, around the US territory of Guam in the western Pacific, is so deep that Mr Garriott is only the third person to reach its deepest point.

Mr Garriott’s round-trip aboard the two-passenger submersible took 12 hours in total: four hours to reach the bottom, four hours of exploration and four hours to return to the surface.

“You sit tight for a four-hour long descent into the dark ... You’re going a mightily long distance and the sub is moving quickly. The light from the surface only penetrates a few hundred metres into the deep,” said Mr Garriott yesterday.

Describing what he saw in the depths of the ocean, he said: “There was a whole variety of small and somewhat difficult-to-see lifeforms, small sea cucumber related creatures and translucent creatures like flatworms.”

At the bottom, he saw a “fluffy” layer of detritus that descends the water column and settles. On the way back up, he caught sight of a siphonophore – a multi-segmented large life form.

“It was a very exciting dive and I feel very privileged to have been at the bottom of the Earth,” he told the Daily Mirror.

Challenger Deep was formed from the collision of two tectonic plates over millions of years and was first measured in 1875 by Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger. Mr Garriott, a dual Britishamerican national, made sure to wear the same suit that he wore into space, which features both the Union flag and the American Stars and Stripes.

He took samples back to the surface, which will be analysed and could contain species not yet known to mankind. And he even found time to film a short sci-fi film while he was at the ocean’s deepest point.

The submersible was built by the US company Triton at the behest of

Caladan Oceanic, a firm that is undertaking a multimillion-pound project to explore and study the depths of the world’s oceans.

Two Devon-based Britons, John Ramsay and Tom Blades, are the principal engineers at Triton and designed the submersible. “This particular submersible was not just designed to take someone to the bottom of the ocean and set a world record,” Mr Ramsay told the paper.

“The idea was to make a submersible that wasn’t an experiment – this would have a legacy going on for years.”

Mr Garriott has already been to the North and South Poles and the RMS Titanic’s wreck. He visited the International Space Station back in 2008, travelling up with the Soyuz TMA-13 mission and returned to Earth 12 days later. He became only the sixth person to go into space as a paying traveller.

The president-elect of the venerable Explorers Club is also known for taking the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on a zero-gravity flight.

Mr Garriott was born in Cambridge to American parents. His father, Owen Garriott, was one of Nasa’s first scientist-astronauts who flew the ninth Nasa Space Shuttle mission. Garriot Jr hopes his own two children will also go on to become explorers.

He was raised in Texas from the age of about two months and dreamed of becoming an astronaut like his father.

However, eyesight problems discovered at the age of 13 blocked his ambition, so he instead came to focus on computer game development.

Character names in one of his most popular computer games, Ultima, hark back to his place of birth.

Mr Garriott himself is also known to his fans as Lord British.

The income from the success of his video game career allowed him to pursue his interest in spaceflight by the mid-1980s.