So he could not only wait out the cloud of sediment, if you will, but he could move around. He had the advantage, though, that with modern technology, 50 years later - batteries and modern sensors and equipment - he could stay down there. But generically, they're called Challenger Deep and all of about equivalent depth over, say, an axis of about 30 miles. The actual Challenger Deep is - consists of really three deep places. So, you know, this is a vast frontier down there that it's going to take us a while to understand.įLATOW: Now, can you relate to what he saw? Are you - or were you in a different part of the trench? The Challenger Deep, which is only a small part of the Mariana Trench, is something like 50 times the size of the Grand Canyon. JAMES CAMERON: When I came down, I landed, it was a very, very soft, almost featureless plain, and it just went out of sight as far as I could see. Now, we have a little clip of James Cameron who just came back, and we have a clip about what he saw when he went down there. Let's - I want to - I held playing back the clip because I wanted to hear you describe what you saw. And so the first images ever made of the deepest place in the ocean were actually made 25 years later by a Japanese - sorry, 35 years later by a Japanese unmanned submersible called Kaiko or a Japanese word for trench.įLATOW: Mm-hmm. But there's a subtle current that'll move that sediment away from the window, and you could make pictures. And that was - stirring up sediment was not unusual. So we did not get any images on our dive. After we landed, though, we stirred up the bottom sediment, which is very fine, very granular, and it remained in suspension for the full 20 minutes we were down there. So in the subsequent years, we've been advised by all kinds of scientists that we didn't see that. We were, if you would, test pilots of this vehicle trying to prove out its capability. Now Jacques Piccard, who was my co-pilot and son of the inventor of the bathyscaphe, Professor Auguste Piccard, he and I were not ichthyologists. And it was a bottom-dwelling type of fish, so it meant that it was where it belonged and that there was food down there and sufficient oxygen to support it. And that was quite a sighting, if true, of a higher-order marine vertebrate in such - at such a great depth. WALSH: Well, just before we landed, we spotted what we thought was a flatfish, a white flat - like a halibut or a sole, a foot long. WALSH: And we culminated that dive series then in January of 1960 with a dive to 24,000 feet, and then about 10 days later, the dive to the deepest place in the world ocean.įLATOW: Now what did you see when you got down there? The French navy had one and our navy had one. And at that time, there was like only two airplanes in the world or only two of these manned deep submersibles in the world. Navy bathyscaphe on test dives at Guam for about five months, each dive being progressively deeper to find out the moods and modes of the Trieste, a rather radical craft for its time. You went down there, what, 52 years ago in 1960. It's good to speak with you.įLATOW: Tell us about that adventure. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Captain.ĭON WALSH: Thank you, Ira. Captain Don Walsh is an oceanographer, honorary president of the Explorers Club, president of International Maritime. The other man went 52 years ago in 1960 and has been an adviser and mentor to Cameron on his trip, and he's here with us today. He conducted a news conference and - we'll get to that in a minute, all right?īefore we get to that, let me introduce to you Captain Don Walsh because although Cameron was - went down there, he's just one of two living people to have visited the deepest gash in the Earth. And when he came back, he told us all what was going on down there. He was down there, and he was able to come back. What's to be found at the very, very bottom of the ocean, in the deepest recesses of the Mariana Trench right out there in the South Pacific? Earlier this week, director James Cameron, the man behind "Avatar" and "Titanic," he went down there, solo in a tiny sub.
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