As an Oceanographer, the Mariana Trench is definitely one of those intriguing places we learn about. When I was in school, very little was known about it, even its full depth was not known. And man had not yet been down to the bottom to explore it. As one of my professors used to boast we have put a man on the moon but only one trip to the bottom of the ocean. Outer space travel is low tech; it only requires one atmosphere change from ambient. Travel to the bottom of the trench requires high tech equipment; we have to cope with more than a 1000 atmospheres of pressure change. This professor previously worked for the Apollo space program so he was always interesting when he would get slightly side-tracked from a regular lesson plan. The manned trip was made by the Bathyscaphe Trieste Deep. It went to 10,911 in 1960 but none since. There have been 2 unmanned subs or ROVs to dive to the bottom, but the first wasn’t until 1996, and the second 2009. There is a current project to revisit it and go slightly deeper. Sir Richard Branson has taken over the project from his friend, the late Steve Fossett. This sub was designed by Graham Hawkes who was one of the founders of Deep Ocean Engineering, the ROVs I sold while at Advanced Marine.
While working at one of my previous jobs, I sold equipment to JAMSTEC, Japan’s large Oceanographic Institute. The equipment was for their deep under water remotely operated vehicle Kaiko. This vehicle in 1996 became the only other vehicle to make it to the bottom at 10,911.4 metres. I also sold this equipment to JAMSTEC’s manned submarine Shenkai 6500, which is rated to 6,500 metres and has been down that far along the trench walls doing scientific studies. I thought that was probably going to be the closest I would get.
While we were enroute from Palau to Guam we were going right over this portion of the world and I felt this would be a monumental moment. There is no ‘x marks the spot’, there isn’t even a spot on the chart. We also didn’t get an exact latitude and longitude. So we used our electronic charts and took their depth readings and figured that would be closest. Here our MaxSea and our BlueCharts differed a bit. MaxSea had the deepest spot at just under 10,000 metres while BlueChart had a depth of 10,909 marked a mile or so away from MaxSeas’s deepest bit. We went to both places to be sure, but I couldn’t confirm it as my depth sounder maxes out at about 100 metres and my lead line is only for shallow water work. But when the water depths are nearly 6 miles below you, I guess being within a mile on the surface has to be pretty close. We were hoping to make it to this point in daylight but arrived slightly after midnight. We also had a low pressure building just southeast of us and we were in kind of a hurry to get to Guam in case this low intensified to something nasty, so we didn’t dare stay around for the sun to come out. Due to this low pressure, the seas were a bit lumpy and the wind was up for the rest of the trip into Guam.
Who would have thought way back in university, that I could foresee boasting of the fact that I have now sailed over the deepest of the deeps in ocean trenches. Thank you Sari Timur and Pauline for helping me reach another milestone achievement.
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| Page taken off MaxSea showing the boat going past the deep part |
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| Page taken off the BlueChart of boat heading for the deepest part |
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