Down Under

Back from the deepest depths ever reached by man, Jacques Piccard and Lieut. Don Walsh flew into Washington last week to receive decorations from President Eisenhower, and to tell how it felt as the bathyscaph Trieste dropped seven miles down through the Pacific Ocean to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The Trieste passed through many thermal layers. When it came to the dense cold layers, it stopped. "We sat on them like going down steps," said Lieut. Walsh. The crew had to release some of the buoyant gasoline in its upper hull before it resumed its dark, downward voyage.

Only contact with the surface was a telephone that transmitted their voices in sonar waves to a listening device on the mother ship. Part ,vay down, it conked out, and the Trieste nen drifted on down, utterly isolated from outside contact. Probably the mother ship had drifted sideways and the sonar waves were not strong enough to penetrate at an angle. When the bathyscaph reached bottom, contact was reestablished. From seven miles down, Walsh's voice reached the listeners, faint but clear.

Hairy Feeling. At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside was 6,000 tons per sq. in., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh.

When the Trieste finally settled on the bottom, it raised clouds of fine white silt. Dr. Andreas B. Rechnitzer, the scientist in charge of the dive, identified the "dust" as diatomaceous ooze, the silica skeletons of small sea creatures, often used as scouring powder. In effect, the Trieste landed in a cloud of Bab-O.

Unsafe Place. Clearly visible when the dust settled was a white flatfish about one foot long. It seemed healthy and it had eyes, although the nearest trace of sunlight was more than seven miles overhead. Swimming six feet above the bottom were a shrimp and a jellyfish, neither of them bothered by the enormous pressure on their bodies. The very fact that these creatures were living and healthy proved that the water had oxygen in it. Therefore it must circulate, because if it were stagnant in the trench, its oxygen would long since have disappeared. One immediate conclusion: ocean trenches are not safe places for dumping radioactive wastes, since their water does not stay put.

The Trieste stayed on the bottom for 30 minutes, but Piccard and Walsh could use its powerful lights for only short periods because the heat they generate made the water around them boil violently. In later dives the Trieste will carry more instruments, take more pictures, and collect water and living creatures from the depths. Says Dr. Rechnitzer: "We'll go up and down like a Yo-yo."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.