2023-06-22 08:16:48
It is enough to observe the enormous difficulties that are being presented in the search and rescue of the small submersible Titan, which disappeared this Sunday in the Atlantic Ocean when it was on its way to visit the remains of the Titanic, to appreciate even more the enormous feat that Jacques Piccard achieved in 1960. : descend in a small bathyscaphe to more than 11,000 meters deep. A record that took more than 60 years to break and that, even today, has only been surpassed by film director James Cameron in 2012. Of course, with much more advanced technology and with which the famous Swiss explorer did not even could dream
International teams are working against the clock to locate the Titan before the oxygen runs out. According to the experts, they are facing a gigantic task that will test the limits of technical knowledge, since they plan to sweep an oceanic area of 20,000 square kilometers with depths that do not reach 4,000 meters, that is, less than a third of the distance to which Piccard descended more than six decades ago.
“It’s very dark down there and very cold. The sea bed is mud. You can’t see your hand in front of your face,” Titanic expert Tim Maltin told NBC News Now. “It’s like being an astronaut on a mission into space,” he added. He then stressed that the enormous pressure at a depth of four kilometers, some 400 times higher than on the surface, makes it difficult to challenge the complicated seascape of Newfoundland, the island in whose waters the submersible was lost. And it is that there are not many human-made boats that can withstand such pressure at these depths.
How then could the small bathyscaphe built by Piccard himself withstand such pressure at a depth three times greater and with a technology that today has become obsolete? On January 24, 1960, ABC described it as one of the greatest feats accomplished by man throughout its history, similar to that achieved by the Apollo 11 spacecraft nine years later, when it put man on earth for the first time. Moon. “The US Navy bathyscaphe Trieste has descended to a depth of more than seven miles in the Mariana Trench, breaking all previous diving records.”
Video. Titan’s space for five passengers OCEANGATE
the records
The Swiss explorer made that trip to the depths of the ocean in the company of US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh. At first it was said that they had descended to 11,340 meters, but measurements made in 1995 determined that the real value had been 10,911 meters (35,797 feet). Without this correction, the couple would still hold the record. Even so, to this day, no person has overcome the barrier of 11,000 meters.
Piccard and Walsh accomplished their feat on January 23, 1960, when they descended in their bathyscaphe to the bottom of Challenger Deep. Then we had to wait until 2012, when James Cameron repeated the feat with the Deepsea Challenger submarine, reaching 10,927 meters. The mark is yet to be broken. “Destroying” and “strange” were the words with which the filmmaker, winner of 11 Oscars for ‘Titanic’, described the environment.
Three years ago, the Chinese submersible Fendouzhe came within 18 meters of the American landmark, after descending to 10,909 meters in the Mariana Trench, just 125 meters from the total depth of the cave (which has a total depth of 11,034 meters) and very close to the place where Piccard and Walsh were in 1960. In the images released by China in 2020, the submersible, manned by three researchers, could be seen moving through dark waters, surrounded by clouds of sediment, while landing slowly on the seabed.
Piccard (above) and Walsh, in Trieste
The window and the Rolex
Because of that descent, Piccard was considered “one of the last great explorers of the 20th century, a true Captain Nemo who traversed the depths of the sea to where no man had gone before or after”, it could be read on ABC after the explorer’s death in 1998, when I was 86 years old. What is surprising is that they achieved his mark only six weeks after setting the previous world record at 7,200 meters depth, thus surpassing it by almost four kilometres.
The underwater journey was scheduled to take five hours. Everything seemed to be going well, even acknowledging that much of the descent was a bore, but when they had covered two-thirds of the way to the bottom, a crash shook the hull of the bathyscaphe. Walsh and Piccard both started and looked at each other in terror, expecting the worst. “It was just a loud crash that sounded like an explosion, but then nothing else happened,” said the Navy lieutenant.
Later, the explorers discovered that an exterior Plexiglas window had cracked under the pressure, which reached up to a ton per square centimeter, a thousand times more than that existing on the surface. The broken window “did not present a life-threatening threat, at least not immediately,” Walsh said in a later interview. However, the return trip took three hours and 15 minutes, to which we had to add the 20 minutes they spent on the ocean floor. In total, eight and a half hours executing the maneuvers and observations they had planned.
The watch that the two explorers tied to the outside of Trieste also withstood those extreme conditions. It was a Rolex Deep Sea Special created by the famous company in 1953, in response to the growing demand for waterproof watches and extreme experiments. Coming out of the water, Piccard sent a telegram to the company’s headquarters in Geneva with the following message: “We are pleased to inform you that your watch works as well at depths of 11,000 meters as it does on the surface.”
Marine life
The Trieste dive, however, represented more than a record-setting journey. As a result of that feat, Piccard and Walsh opened the door to an oceanic world that had never before been studied by science, since until then it was considered devoid of marine life. Upon bottoming out, the scientists used mercury-vapor lamps to survey the pitch-black area. What they were able to observe left them amazed. Piccard stated that, “by far the most interesting discovery was the flatfish or pleuronectiformes that we were able to observe lurking on the ocean floor through the porthole.” And he added: “Finding complex forms of marine life down there blew our minds.”
The Swiss explorer had everything in his genes. Jacques continued the work of his father, Auguste Piccard, a physicist friend of Einstein and Marie Curie who invented the stratospheric balloon and the bathyscaphe in which his son descended. In fact, they both built it together. Later, this model of the submersible was purchased by the United States Navy with the purpose of “demonstrating that their country had the capacity to explore the seabed in its deepest parts”.
Jacques Piccard later dedicated himself to building mesoscaphes (medium-depth submersibles), including the first tourist submarine that carried up to 33,000 passengers to the depths of Lake Geneva during the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition. In 1969, he carried out a new milestone by spending a month underwater in one of their submarines and travel 3,000 kilometers analyzing the Gulf Stream. All this with the same faith in the technology with which he had directed the construction of each and every one of the submarines that he designed. He himself tried them all on his first dive until he was 82 years old.
“There is no doubt that man is heading for the last adventure in the foundations of the earth,” Piccard commented a year after his descent.
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