One thing I’ve learned from the Okeanos Explorer’s ROV trip to the Marianas Trench, is that deep sea jellyfish just like to let it all hang out. How else you going to feed effectively if you don’t wave your tentacles around like you just don’t care? But get too close to this unidentified jelly, and you risk triggering its Inspector Gadget quality evasive maneuvers. RETRACT! SWIM AWAY! Live to extend another day. You go jelly, you go.

More awesome videos and photos from this incredible series of dives can be found here.

The post GO GO GADGET JELLYFISH! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When he made his historic solo dive into the Mariana Trench last month, James Cameron brought back images and descriptions of a “lunar like” marine landscape nearly devoid of life.-via National Geographic

Returning from humankind’s first solo dive to the deepest spot in the ocean, filmmaker James Cameron said he saw no obvious signs of life that might inspire creatures in his next “Avatar” movie but was awestruck by the “complete isolation.” –via Christian Science Monitor

The quotes above illustrate just two of the many mainstream media pieces that highlighted James Cameron’s comment of a lifeless landscape at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  However, Cameron fell into a trap nearly 200 years old.

Edward Forbes is the whipping boy of deep-sea biology.  Forbes’s big mistake was concluding, in the mid-1800s, that marine life could not exist deeper than 550 meters, what he called the “azoic hypothesis.” Given the state of knowledge at the time, it seemed logical that no species could survive under the extremes of high pressure, lack of light, and cold temperatures characterizing the deepest ocean. Unsurprisingly, Forbes’s thinking spread quickly among the scientific community. The azoic hypothesis ultimately proved wrong or this blog would have a lot less fodder for writing and a different title.  How Forbes was wrong is the interesting part.

Forbes based is azoic hypothesis on sampling he did in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, an area that sees little phytoplankton production.  With less food at the ocean’s surface, less food will sink to the deep ocean floor resulting in little abyssal life.  Unsurprisingly, when Forbes pulled his trawled samples from the deep they were not brimming with a cornucopia of life.

Forbes also didn’t know that the low food arriving to the deep sea miniaturized animals.  In one of the earliest papers on the deep-sea fauna, Mosely (1880) noted, “Some animals appear to be dwarfed by deep-sea conditions.” Almost a century later, Hessler (1974) noted that “individuals of certain taxa are routinely so small that they are of meiofaunal size.” Thiel (1975) echoes these comments by noting the deep sea is a “small organism habitat.”

Consider that the entire collection of deep-sea gastropods from the western North Atlantic collected under the WHOI’s Benthic Sampling Program (44 samples, 20,561 individuals) would fit completely inside a single Busycon carica, a typical-sized New England knobbed whelk.  Forbes nets with their big mesh size allowed most animals to pass right through.  Today of course we use finer mesh sizes on nets or cores so we don’t miss the diversity of small life.

I cannot help but wonder if Cameron fell into the same trap that Forbes did so long ago, an underappreciation of the complexity and uniqueness of deep-sea life.

Was he waiting for charismatic megafauna that never arrived and potentially never existed at the deepest point in the ocean?

Bob McDondald in a recent Op-Ed  stated,

… there is no substitute for good science. Big budgets and lots of publicity gather public attention – a stunt such as a solo dive to the deepest part of the ocean will get an explorer into the history books, just as a free fall from the edge of space did.  But these are often one-off events. The whole point of the exercise was to get there. Science, on the other hand, is a systematic, step-by-step process that explores carefully, building on past successes and putting new discoveries into the broader context of the scientific community. A robot sub being hauled out of the water may not look as dramatic as the scene of a hatch opening and the triumphant explorer emerging to a cheering crowd, but what the science actually reveals is the most dramatic of all

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention another point glossed over and even blatantly misrepresented in the media.  Cameron’s dive, while worthy of praise on many fronts, is a not the first exploration of the deepest part of the ocean.  Scientists, especially Japanese researchers, have been sampling the bottom of the trench extensively for a few decades with robots and landers.

As McDonald points out, and the labor of many expeditions and scientists has demonstrated, the Marianas Trench is actually full of life.  Although contrary to what McDonald claims new research didn’t reveal this fact but only supports what we’ve known for a while.

Marianas Trench is teeming with microbial life.  In 1997, a species of the common bacteria Pseudomonas was discovered from 11,000 meters deep. In 1998, Japanese researchers using the remotely operated vehicle Kaiko found evidence of two barophilic, pressure loving as you would expect from trench critters, bacteria.  Both bacteria species were from completely different groups.  In 2006, Japanese researchers hit a biological gold mine of microbes.  Actinobacteria, non-extermophilic bacteria, three major groups of extremophilic bacteria, fungi…O my! And o’ how the reports of new microbial species just keep coming, and coming, and coming, and coming, and coming, and coming in.  Indeed, microbial activity is shockingly high…even for those of us expecting it.

Naysayers will surely point out how bacteria somehow don’t count as real life.  They live everywhere. These people have some size threshold for life to count. I give you naysayers protists!  Foraminifera, amoeboid protists vital for nutrient cycling in the oceans, also exist at the greatest depths of the Marianas Trench.  Perhaps some will need something even larger…a metazoan.

Multicellular life is also known from the Marianas Trench.  From even the earliest explorations the large crustacean, the amphipod Hirondellea gigas, was observed.  Scientists have even isolated bacteria from its body.  Indeed, larger organisms have been found at the bottom of several trenches (see photo below).  A specimen of sea anemone of the genus Galatheanthemum, a worm from the genus Macellicephaloides, an isopod crustacean of the genus Macrostylis, and a sea cucumber Myriotrochus bruuni are all known from the deepest trench on earth and reported back in the 1970’s by Torbin Wolff (of Haka fame).

Cameron stated after his dive the necessity of returning to the deepest point in the ocean, the Challenger Deep, once again to explore.  I could not agree more. Our understanding of this trench, like much of the deep, is rudimentary.  We only have a partial glimpse of the life that existing there. However, we do know that it is not a lifeless void.  A wealth of life exists at Marianas Trench. You just have to know how to loo for it.

The post Is Marianas Trench A Lifeless Void? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I asked, “What were the events that lead to you to dive the Marianas Trench?”

Don Walsh one of two men to first visit the deepest point of the world’s ocean and one of only three to succeed at this responded quickly.

“I found myself there for all the wrong reasons.”

Don Walsh probably always possessed the explorer gene.  But it was genes plus environment that produced Walsh.  Walsh grew up in the large port of San Francisco Bay inundated with the salty air, large ships, small boats, dark waters, a busy port, and the momentous Fleet Week. These potentially hinted that something beyond San Francisco existed, something more to explore, and the commonness of people traveling to new places. “It seemed natural that I join the Navy.”

Oddly Walsh’s Naval career started off on a torpedo bomber facing backward. “I really wanted to be in the pilot seat facing forward.”  The best way toward this was obtaining a college degree and particularly through the Naval Academy.  When I asked how he succeeded in gaining entrance into the prestigious Naval Academy, Walsh replied “Luck.”  Upon completion, all graduates of the academy are required to serve as watch officers aboard a surface ship for two years.  After serving aboard both the USS Wisconsin and the Albany, Walsh had hoped to specialize in aviation and return to the cockpit.  However, poor eye sight prevented this path. Thus began a career as a submariner.

Eventually he was asked to join the submarine command staff in San Diego. The position was temporary. As other submarines and their officers cycled through the port, they would also cycle through Walsh’s position.  Each officer serving in this post was to return back to a field command aboard a submarine after six weeks.  This did not happen.  “I did my job too well and was kept in the post.”

Eventually in 1958, the Office of Naval Research purchased the Bathyscaphe Trieste from the French Navy. Given the proximity to deep water, the U.S. Navy decided the Trieste should join the fleet at San Diego.  Walsh was contacted to learn about this submersible and eventually brief the commander.

Two pilots were needed to operate Trieste.  The closest the U.S Navy could offer were the intermediate ranking officers of submarines.  Walsh was given the order to send out a message to these officers in the Pacific Fleet asking for volunteers to train and eventually pilot the Trieste.  Only one of twelve potentials volunteered to pilot this metal sphere to deepest parts of the oceans. Eager to leave his San Diego desk and return to the sea, Walsh volunteered for the other position.

The other volunteering officer outranked Walsh.  As coincidence or fate would have, however, the senior officer fell ill, and Walsh became the ranking Naval officer on the Trieste project.  Just three months after joining the project in March 1959, Don Walsh dove to 4,000 feet, ten times deeper than the during his previous posts aboard submarines.  One year later off Guam, the delay needed as the Trieste was originally only designed to dive to 20,000 feet, Walsh would go more than 100 times deeper.

Walsh and I never discussed the actual dive on the Challenger Deep as so many others before have covered this ground with him. Instead I choose to finish our discussion in another way. When I asked Don Walsh what question he wished somebody would ask him, he responded,

“Why is this all important?  Why must we visit the deepest spots of our oceans?”

Walsh started his answer by relaying what a commanding officer said to him when he showed him a photograph of fish taken in the Challenger Deep, “Most expensive goddam picture of fish ever taken!”

Walsh, a pragmatic man and a rare trait in explorer but perhaps common of retired naval officers, finally answered “We have seen the origins of plates at mid-oceanic ridges, it only makes sense we would see their demise at the bottom of trenches.” And for a brief second the explorer gene was stronger than the gene for pragmatism, “Also because it’s there and we can.”

Jacque Cousteau once said to his son Jean-Michel that his life was “a lot of little things that came together just right.”  Cousteau’s and Walsh’s life both exemplify the opportunity of the unplanned and the ability and drive to pursue and recognize it. Our paths in life are often not a strait trajectory from here and now at point A to the future point B, even if we know exactly what we B to be.  Kevin’s personal story and others as part of the I Am Science project are beautiful reminders of the tangled path we wander and the series of unexpected events we encounter. As an undergraduate I was deeply disappointed when a professor did not choose me to dive in St. Croix conducting reef fish counts.  Another professor, my alternate choice, did invite me to work in their research group.  That professor eventually became my Ph.D. advisor and instilled passion and knowledge in me for the deep sea, which led to an eventual submersible dive of my own, a marine blog, and recently a discussion and car ride with the legend and man who is Captain Don Walsh.

All we can do is recognize opportunity in the unexpected, long to explore the origin and the conclusion, and sometimes take the risk because it’s there and we can.

The post I Am Science with the First Man to Dive Challenger Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Among both scientists and non-scientists there is skepticism about James Cameron’s “Deep Sea Challenge” dive into the Marianas Trench on Sunday and what it really achieved for society.  We keep getting asked: why should we do this and what do we get from Cameron going to the deep?  Deep-sea exploration is expensive, difficult and dangerous. Why should anyone go, let alone he?

One of our more cynical colleagues on Twitter stated:

“Rich asshole builds his own sub and dives really deep. Yawn. Gullible scios and journos mistake such vanity tourism for important discovery”

And one of us [Dr. M] admits that he was also skeptical of the importance of all of this to begin with, but that was before the exciting events of Sunday evening.

There is precedent for this in other fields.  Consider alpha taxonomy (the description of new species), for example, which is where one of us [para_sight], started his scientific career.  The first step to cataloguing new biodiversity is to go out there and collect some samples and take a look; it really is that simple!   As the taxonomy builds, you have to go out ever further and look ever closer, but the process is the same and it is generally NOT built on specific hypotheses, despite how it may be stated in grant applications ;)    Alpha taxonomy is exploratory research in exactly the same way as Cameron’s deep sea mission.  He dove to the Marianas Trench in search of new life, whereas para_sight dissected the guts of fish species that had never been necropsied before in search of new species of parasitic worms.  We don’t think anyone would argue that taxonomy is not science, so why would deep sea exploration not also be?

 “Which is a better investment, science or exploration?  The question is almost as old as the space program itself, and answering it won´t get any easier as humans move toward establishing a lunar base. But could science be an inevitable outgrowth of exploration?”

– David Tenenbaum

We agree with this view that exploration is simply the inductive first step towards more formal deductive science, which brings us to first reason why we should explore:

1.     Exploration is about observation, the first step of the scientific process.  Without exploration we do not have the intellectual fodder for scientific discovery

We may not even know what we should be asking! :

2.     Exploration is about knowledge, about expanding our horizons and answering questions that we haven’t even thought of asking yet

Thus:

3.     Through exploration we can gain knowledge about earth, life, and potentially other planets.

Of course exploration also has immediate and tangible benefits.  Doing new things means doing them in new ways and, necessity being the mother of invention, technology advances hand in hand with exploration:

4. Exploration leads to technological and engineering innovation as we strive to meet new challenges.

5.     To explore the unknown means discovery with ramifications unseen. 

“Throughout history, the great nations have been the ones at the forefront of the frontiers of their time. Britain became great in the 17th century through its exploration and mastery of the seas. America’s greatness in the 20th century stemmed largely from its mastery of the air.”-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. “”I believe America should look to its future – and consider what that future will look like if we choose not to be a spacefaring nation.”

Undoubtedly one metric of society is its culture of exploration of new frontiers in space, technology, Earth but in the arts and sciences in general.  Put simply:

6.     Through exploration, nations become great.

We should visit the moon or trench simply because we have not been there before or not been there enough.  To not go is to deny our very nature.  We should go because we are driven to rise to a challenge presented:

7.     A humans we are a naturally curious species, we deny our humanity if we do not explore the unknown world around us. 

To meet the obstacles, both seen and unforeseen, of exploration requires the dissolution of borders, barriers, languages, and dispute.  We must cooperate.

8.     Exploration allows for the unification of humanity around great achievement.

Importantly, how do we excite the public and youth about technology and science?  How many kids wanted to be astronauts when they grow up?  How many wanted to be marine biologists because they saw Cousteau exploring the oceans?  If we want to inspire in education and get away from standardized tests and No Child Left Behind, we need to offer new heroes and new dreams.  STEM may be about math, technology, and science, but it all starts with inspiration:

9.     Exploration allows us to inspire others to be explorers and scientists.

As we write this we feel that the most important one, which we save for last, nobody ever states seriously.  Sure all these others are important but they do not touch the core of why exploration is important.  We will no longer be ashamed or apologetic about the fact that:

10.     We should explore because it’s cool, awesome, and amazing.

And given the opportunity any of us would have traded places with Cameron.

The post 10 Reasons Why We Should Explore The Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In the 1989 James Cameron sci-fi movie The Abyss, there’s a scene when Ed Harris’ character dons a special environmental suit that allows him to breathe an oxygen-laden liquid.  Thus protected from the risks of crushing deep-sea pressures (no air = no voids to collapse), he drops from a deep submerged research facility into the inky depths of an abyssal canyon to find and disarm a lost weapon.  During the descent, robbed of speech by the liquid he’s breathing, he’s forced to communicate with his colleagues on the base using text messages tapped out on a forearm console.  What ensues is one of the more tense scenes in sci-fi history as Harris suffers first the effects of pressure, then tackles the errant weapon, and eventually stumbles upon a remarkable submarine alien race in the movie’s climax, all communicated piecemeal to his colleagues on the base in choppy text speech.  Rarely have little green letters appearing on black screen carried so much drama.  Have some new friends down here. Guess they’ve been here awhile…

The whole scene has an eerily prophetic feel in light of exciting news that James Cameron has, himself, made a historic descent in a new submersible beyond the abyssal depths, to the hadal reaches of the deepest part of the world’s oceans: the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, south of Guam in the west Pacific.  This event marks the first occasion that a manned vehicle has been to Challenger Deep since the first and only time it ever happened when, in 1960, Don Wash and Jacques Piccard descended in the bathyscaphe Trieste.  That storied 1960 mission occurred during the heyday of modern US exploration when, fueled by the intense international competition and brinksmanship of the Cold War, Americans could and did tackle any challenge: space, speed, altitude and depth.  In the wake of the Trieste effort, the submersible Alvin was built 4 years later and became the flagship deep sea vehicle for the US and arguably the world, for the next 40 years, even though it has never had the capability of returning to Challenger Deep.

Times change.  The motivations for exploration are different these days and we think it’s fair to say diminished somewhat.  Space folks are experiencing much the same effect, most recently epitomized by the cancellation of the space shuttle project without a viable replacement vehicle for near-earth operations.  Yes, marine science, engineering technology and the motivation for exploratory missions have all changed in the interceding 52 years since Trieste and Deep Challenger.  One constant is that Alvin is still with us; indeed, Alvin is the only human occupied vehicle (HOV) left for deep-sea research in the US.  Think about that for a second: the only vessel that can take humans to the deep sea in America is 48 years old.  The same age as this:Of course we’re being hyperbolic; Alvin is no way a rusted hooptie.  It has been completely renovated and refitted several times and is still a very advanced research tool.  Our point is more that the original design is pretty long in the tooth and you have to wonder if starting from scratch using current design principles we might be able to devise a better tool.  The same has of course been said many times for the space shuttle.

Not that deep sea research has waned for lack of manned research tools; far from it.  Advances in remotely operated vehicle (ROV) technology have seen a veritable explosion of deep sea research and some remarkable discoveries that are still occurring at a rapid rate today.  The discoveries of these remote controlled robot explorers have included the hydrothermal vent communities, the exploration of mid ocean ridges, the census of marine life and discovery of deep reefs, brine pools, cold seeps and other extraordinary habitats that prove that the deep sea is anything but a cold lifeless desert.  HOV’s have been used for some of these missions too, but ROV’s certainly seem to be the tool of choice these days.  Why is that? The answer is basically pragmatism.  There are incredible challenges to sending people into the abyssal depths and beyond.  The pressures can exceed a thousand atmospheres, which has been described as equivalent to inverting the Eifel Tower and resting its point on your big toe.  That kind of pressure means that a titanium sphere is about the only object that can maintain a 1 atmosphere internal environment.  By contrast, no passenger means no need for air spaces at all, so ROV’s can be built more cheaply and easily, and without the need for complex life support systems that can ensure the safety of the vehicles occupant(s).  An ROV can allow for longer bottom times not constrained by tired pilots or scientists with small bladders.  ROV’s allow for a whole array of scientists to participate in the dive, all sitting in the same control center in the mother ship watching HD monitors.  Opposed to the 1-2 that can fit into a submersible.  The rise of the ROV is therefore rational, sensible, effective and … boring.

Boring? BORING??  Yes, boring.  We say that because we think it’s largely those in the business of researching the deep sea who can look past the removal of the human element and derive deep satisfaction from ROV operations, by focusing instead on the substantive returns on the topic of their research.  Often times they are able to do this out of the luxury of having at least tasted the 1^st hand HOV experience themselves.  They know what it looks like out the porthole, so can better relate to what shows on the video feed coming back from an ROV.  Other times it’s a purely rationalist thing: scientists know that they’re going to get more bang for their research buck from an ROV, so that’s where they invest their efforts, research funds and emotional energy.

It’s a reasonable question to ask then: What is the value of the HOV in modern deep sea research? We have to give a slightly disappointing answer here, which is that we don’t really know.  If one applies that purely pragmatic approach, then ROV’s will probably win every time.  That’s a pity, because to do so is to overlook the inspirational and aspirational elements of the HOV approach.  One does not have to have been to a hydrothermal vent in Alvin to appreciate HOV’s anymore than one has to have been to the moon on Apollo 11 to appreciate Armstrong and Aldrin.  Our position is this: the idea of humans traveling to extreme environments, challenging and overcoming technical and engineering obstacles to do things not yet done, that’s the stuff that’s going to inspire kids to a career in science, not an economically rationalist analysis of research ROI that favors a robotic approach.

As we sat on our respective couches tonight hanging on to every tweet from Cameron and crew (‘cos hell knows, the mainstream media didn’t cover it much, but that’s another post for another day), we felt that we were participants.  When Cameron launched, we launched with him.  As he descended, we waited patiently for each update on his depth and progress (thanks @PaulGAllen!).  When, near the end, 30 minutes went by without any word, we were filled with anxiety and consternation.  And finally, when that silence broke with the statement that Cameron had reached the bottom, we sighed with relief and cheered for his success!  We celebrated because we understand that this represents a profound moment in our history.  From thousands of kilometers away, we participated.  We are reminded of our friends cheering for teams in the current NCAA tournament.  Why not just let robot play?  Why do we need humans?  Because human involvement allows us all to participate.

All of which brings us back to James Cameron (@jimcameron).  Here we have a wealthy individual who has had phenomenal success in another sphere of human endeavor and has then chosen to spend some of his wealth to do something done only once before, and do it a new way for the first time in half a century.  It’s not like he just decided to do this yesterday; Cameron has been doing deep sea dives for years and has over 70 under his belt, which is more than many scientists.  He is often quoted as saying that he makes blockbuster movies to support his real passion for deep-sea exploration.  How do we get aboard that gravy train?! You need only look at the aforementioned scene from The Abyss, or perhaps at the rainforest flora of Avatar’s megadiverse planet of Pandora (all of which look remarkably like benthic invertebrates of various flavors), to see that the ocean and the life within it have influenced him deeply.

We are not afraid to say that we are inspired by his commitment and his willingness to put his money and effort where his mouth is, by pushing the envelope of human exploration.  And yes, even we, with our charismatic marine biology research, aspire to his achievements, too: We would love to be in that little sphere and to peer out that fist-sized porthole and see things never seen by anyone before.

The question that remains unanswered is: “Is it science”?  We would argue emphatically YES.  Cameron’s team did equip their sub with a manipulator arm and suction sampler and they plan to return with specimens from the Challenger Deep, which Trieste could not, although a few ROV’s have done so in the interceding period.  Of course, we hope that this will only be the first of many dives, that Alvin has a new stable mate and the world has a new full-depth-capable research submersible.   The team also had many technological challenges to overcome in the construction of the Deep Challenger submersible, so it’s science from an engineering perspective too.  Doubtless they will gather abundant amounts of video data that can be used to answer scientific questions, just as it can be used to make compelling National Geographic shows.  And the whole endeavor is exploratory in nature, and ocean exploration is and always has been the realm of science.  Observation is, after all, the first step of the scientific method!

Why, then, might some people dismiss the Deep Challenger mission as a rich guy’s boondoggle?   It’s partly the person doing it.   Cameron is not a scientist by training and will likely not turn the results of this expedition into, say, peer-reviewed papers, so perhaps it’s considered pseudo-scientific, but we think this is a dour view that does little justice to the motivations of Deep Challenger and the societal values of this and all explorations.  Even if you put aside any and all pretense to science in this mission (which would be unfair), then simply by virtue of the attention that Cameron’s success will bring to deep-sea research, the mission will have been an unmitigated success.  Indeed, one only need look at the media excitement over the perceived “race to the bottom” (in which Cameron, Richard Branson and Sylvia Earle were supposedly competing to be the first back to Challenger Deep) to see the power of HOV exploration to raise the profile of deep sea research.  In this “race to the bottom” story, however manufactured, we see the media reaching for the kind of compelling conflict that motivated the space race in the 60’s, drama that ultimately shaped the nation’s perceptions of science and engineering for two generations.  Doesn’t that tell you something about the extraordinary potential value of exploratory science?

There’s a great opportunity offset here, too: every column inch spent talking about the wonders and challenges of deep sea exploration is one less inch spent on the latest overpaid celebrity without any real accomplishments or why this pair of pants is must-get for 2012.  Plug in a new name or a new designer and it is the same regurgitated news from last year.  By contrast, every deep dive reveals something new and exciting in the oceans.  Why then is the entire annual ocean exploration budget just a fraction of our national science budget (which is in turn an undersized slice of the federal budget)?  And why has NOAA just zeroed out the budget for the National Undersea Research Program?  Cameron has described this development as “piss-poor” and we definitely agree.

For all these reasons we think it’s time for marine biologists to proudly step into the spotlight offered by the fantastic achievements of the Deep Challenger team.  We need to seize this opportunity to show the public that there is still so much yet to learn in the deep, and that exploration, far from being remote and esoteric, is possible and still inspiring, right here, right now, on this planet.  We should admire the adventurous spirit of James Cameron and to embrace him as a new and legitimate celebrity advocate with tremendous capacity to advance the cause of the marine sciences.  Who knows, by so doing, we might well be able to secure a better funding future for other deep sea research programs and thereby advance science, however you want to define it.  In short, when Cameron succeeds, we all succeed.

The post James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenge: a scientific milestone or rich guy’s junket? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Here it is in his own words:

This is incredibly exciting news for anyone entranced by deep sea exploration and thrilled at the prospects of humans returning to the deepest place on earth after 52 years (Walsh and Piccard were the only folks to ever do it, in 1960).  My pulse is racing just thinking about it.  Our best wishes for a successful mission and watch this space for more news!

The post The biggest deep sea exploration news in 50 years? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Last year saw the passing of a legend, Jacques Piccard. Along with Don Walsh, these two trailblazers forged an era of deep-sea exploration that no other person has been able to supersede. Don and Jacques manned the Bathyscaphe Trieste down 10,916 meters to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, a place now known as Challenger Deep. There they witnessed firsthand life in the deepest part of ocean as flatfish scurried away from the descending vehicle, sealing the fate of the possibility for a lifeless deep.

My good friend and deep-sea colleague has produced an art print to celebrate the 50th anniversary this year of this unheralded feat (reproduced in part above). In the words of project co-founder Peter Batson – deep-sea photographer, biologist, author of Deep New Zealand and coauthor of the recently released Into the Deep:

“We started the Trieste print project four years ago, when Jacques was still alive. A limited edition art print seemed like a good idea – guys like Edmund Hillary and the lunar astronauts had been doing signed art prints for years.  It seemed crazy that the defining moment in deep ocean exploration was not being similarly commemorated – Trieste’s Deep Dive really is mind-boggling when you look into it.

Captain Don Walsh worked on the print with us, helping us out with acquiring Navy structural plans and other technical advice. It was a very interesting project to work on, as you can imagine, and as a fellow deep-sea nut I don’t need to explain how amazing it was spending time with both Trieste divers. I knew who these guys were when I was a kid.”

Please visit their well-designed website, DeepestDive.com, dedicated to preserving the memory of the Trieste. There is a lot of great information there. This is a rare once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for collectors and the asking is not cheap, but you will own a valuable piece of ocean exploration history, including a signed print by Walsh and the now deceased Piccard.

The post Celebrating the Deepest Dive first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Special thanks to Peter Sloss, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center.

The post TGIF: Fly-through Marianas Trench first appeared on Deep Sea News.