Posted on 12/23/2018 11:09:35 AM PST by ETL
He scaled Mount Everest and the very best peaks on the six different continents. He skied to the North and South poles.
Now, Victor Vescovo, the multimillionaire co-founder of a personal fairness firm in Dallas, Texas, needs to be the primary individual to go to the deepest level in every of the 5 oceans.
This week, Vescovo was set to full the primary dive within the yearlong Five Deeps Expedition, piloting a titanium-alloy, 12.5-ton submersible down 8408 meters to the deepest a part of the Atlantic Ocean, within the Puerto Rico Trench.
Five Deeps could seem like a conceit undertaking, however for scientists, it’s a uncommon alternative to research inaccessible, mysterious locations.
“If there wasn’t this rich guy, there is not any funding agency that would be willing to spend so much money to visit all those areas,” says Ann Vanreusel, a deep-sea biologist at Ghent University in Belgium.
The expedition will yield high-resolution maps that might supply clues about how ocean trenches kind when tectonic plates plunge into the mantle. The dives are additionally certain to spot new species, which is able to give researchers an opportunity to examine the ecosystems which have advanced in these remoted, unique habitats. “Great insights could come when we can start comparing these ultradeep sites,” says Stuart Piertney, an evolutionary biologist on the University of Aberdeen within the United Kingdom.
The HMS Challenger Expedition, a pioneering voyage within the 1870s, confirmed that life exists throughout the deep ocean by trawling and dredging up creatures from as deep as 8000 meters.
Since then, analysis trawls have netted cutthroat eels, snailfish, and different animals tailored to the chilly and strain. Some depend on bioluminescence to appeal to mates or prey within the darkness. Below 8000 meters, sea cucumbers and large crustaceans referred to as amphipods dominate.
Firsthand exploration of the trenches has been restricted. People have reached the underside of the Mariana Trench, the world’s deepest trench, solely twice: in 1960, within the bathyscaphe Trieste, and in 2012, when film director James Cameron descended in an $eight million customized submersible.
In 1964, a French submersible descended 8385 meters to what was then thought to be the deepest a part of the Puerto Rico Trench. The different three deeps have by no means been visited, though trenches elsewhere have been probed with remotely operated submersibles and autonomous landers. Landers could make measurements, file pictures, and acquire samples earlier than returning to the floor, however cannot be managed or focused.
Alan Jamieson, a marine ecologist at Newcastle University within the United Kingdom who designed a few of these landers, now can go to a number of trenches himself, because the science chief for the Five Deeps Expedition. In March 2017, he acquired a cryptic cellphone name from Triton Submarines, a high-end producer in Sebastian, Florida.
After signing a nondisclosure settlement, Jamieson realized that Vescovo had purchased a 68-meter-long analysis vessel from the U.S. authorities and commissioned Triton to construct a submersible able to diving to 11,000 meters.
Designed for fast descents and ascents, the Limiting Factor has three acrylic portholes, leather-based seats for Vescovo and a passenger, and customized lithium batteries to energy propellers for scooting alongside the ocean flooring.
“When somebody telephones up and says, ‘We have a multi-multi-multi-million-dollar submarine that can do things that your own gear can’t,’ it looks as if a logical step ahead,” Jamieson says.
A rotating forged of 15 collaborators will be a part of Jamieson on the mom ship, Pressure Drop. It has house for 3 scientists, a moist lab, and a $1.5 million multibeam sonar to map the ocean flooring and confirm its deepest spots.
Race to the bottoms
The Five Deeps Expedition goals to attain each ocean’s deepest trench and 7 different deep websites in 11 months.
Nobody can write that badly. It has to be some sort of computer translation.
Project is pretty interesting.
Wonder if the wun’s BC will be found?
The expedition will traverse 40,000 nautical miles / 74,000 km in 11 months.
By the end of the expedition the sub will have descended through at least 72,000 m / 236,220 ft of water.
Up to 50 scientific lander deployments will be undertaken alongside the submersible dives.
No human has ever been to the bottom of the Java, Puerto Rico* or South Sandwich trenches.
No one has ever been to the bottom of Molloy Deep.
No manned submersible has ever been to Challenger Deep more than once.
No person has ever been to the summit of Mount Everest and also been to the bottom of the ocean at Challenger Deep, which could occur on this expedition.
11,000 meters is 36,089 feet (rounded down). There are 5,280 feet to a mile which is 6.8 miles (also rounded down).
An awesome experience for the adrenaline junkies. At least the first time down. What will he seek next to satisfy his need for adrenaline rushes? 8>)
That it is. I’ve always been interested in very deep dives, ever since I was a kid, reading about Beebe and Barton and their bathysphere. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) had a bathysphere out in front of their old West Hills location, and we could climb around in and on it.
8>) Took me awhile to realize what you were actually referring to.
I remember that scene from Raise The Titanic where the submersible got destroyed.
Still creeps me a little even if it was a movie that wasn’t anywhere near as good as the book.
It is a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth’s crust averaging about 2,550 km (1,580 mi) long and 69 km (43 mi) wide.
The maximum known depth is 10,994 metres (36,070 ft) (± 40 metres [130 ft]) at the southern end of a small slot-shaped valley in its floor known as the Challenger Deep.[2]
However, some unrepeated measurements place the deepest portion at 11,034 metres (36,201 ft).[3]
For comparison: if Mount Everest were dropped into the trench at this point, its peak would still be over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) under water.[a]
At the bottom of the trench the water column above exerts a pressure of 1,086 bars (15,750 psi), more than 1,000 times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
At this pressure, the density of water is increased by 4.96%, so that 95.27 litres of water under the pressure of the Challenger Deep would contain the same mass as 100 litres at the surface.
The temperature at the bottom is 1 to 4 °C (34 to 39 °F).[5]
The trench is not the part of the seafloor closest to the centre of the Earth. This is because the Earth is not a perfect sphere; its radius is about 25 kilometres (16 mi) smaller at the poles than at the equator.[6]
As a result, parts of the Arctic Ocean seabed are at least 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) closer to the Earth’s centre than the Challenger Deep seafloor.
In 2009, the Marianas Trench was established as a United States National Monument.[7]
Xenophyophores have been found in the trench by Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers at a record depth of 10.6 kilometres (6.6 mi) below the sea surface.[8]
On 17 March 2013, researchers from the Scottish Association for Marine Science reported data that suggested microbial life forms thrive within the trench.[9][10]
“Because of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing.
The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is a crushing eight tons per square inch—or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Pressure increases with depth.
The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached this goal in a U.S. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste.
After a five-hour descent, the pair spent only a scant 20 minutes at the bottom and were unable to take any photographs due to clouds of silt stirred up by their passage.
Until Piccard and Walsh’s historic dive, scientists had debated whether life could exist under such extreme pressure. But at the bottom, the Trieste‘s floodlight illuminated a creature that Piccard thought was a flatfish, a moment that Piccard would later describe with excitement in a book about his journey. ...”
http://www.deepseachallenge.com/the-expedition/mariana-trench/
In 2009, the Marianas Trench was established as a United States National Monument.[7]”
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Since when is a trench considered to ba a “monument”?
.
Pretty sure I dated her once.
It’d be a perfect location for the SC state Fair.
Pretty sure I dated her once.
Lifetime pass to the (future) Obama Presidential Library for the first one who can guess the film this still shot is from!
Don’t go down there, I’m warnin’ ya.
Was this article translated form Chinese or Ugaritic or possibly Sanskrit?
Erik is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues and UK research.
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