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Vescovo spent four hours puttering around down there, searching for
sea anemones and other life. That too was a record: the longest any hu-
man has spent in the trench. (The sub can go about 16 hours before it
plugs in for a recharge.) He returned a few days later, because no one
ever had; Limiting Factor made four dives in the area over eight days.
And there was a special guest on board Pressure Drop to witness
it all: Don Walsh. Now 87, he’s been wondering for most of his adult
life why everyone was ignoring these swaths of deep ocean. Walsh
was thrilled to be there while a human descended to Challenger
Deep in a vehicle that wasn’t a one-off. “This was a demonstration
of system reliability and operational efficiency never seen before in
exploration of the oceans’ deepest places,” he said.
On Vescovo’s first Challenger dive, all three of the seafloor landers
malfunctioned and came back up before he reached the bottom. On
the second dive, one of them got stuck in the muck, and when expe-
dition leader McCallum heard Lahey fretting over the idea of writing
off the $250,000 cost, McCallum pointed out something: “You know
you have a full-ocean-depth submersible on board?”
Lahey cleared the idea with Vescovo, then took Limiting Factor
back to the bottom himself to perform the deepest underwater sal-
vage in history. He brought certifier DNV-GL’s Jonathan Struwe with
him, and upon returning to the surface (with the lander!), Struwe
approved the vessel for “unlimited diving depth.” Yet another first.
Just three days after returning from the Pacific, Vescovo and Lahey
flew to New York City to announce the new record dives at the Explor-
ers Club. On a rainy Monday night, the two men sat at the front of a
grand, wood-paneled salon as Ted Janulis, from the club’s board of
directors, introduced their mission to members and media. Janulis
pointed out some of the more notable flags framed on the walls, in-
cluding the ones that flew on Apollo missions, and explained that Flag
No. 81—the one they gave to Vescovo—would also return here when
he finished all five deeps. Janulis also noted that when people enter
the club, they pass a plaque marking the five famous firsts: North Pole,
South Pole, Mount Everest, the moon, and Challenger Deep.
That last spot hadn’t seen a human since James Cameron went
in 2012. Now, in a single week, Vescovo and his crew had more than
doubled the number of visits to the nadir of our oceans, and they’d
done it in a submersible that’s able to go back, anytime.
“This is a new saga to the story,” Janulis told the audience, one
that “extends, celebrates, and furthers deep-sea exploration in a
remarkable way. This is about as great as it gets.”
Vescovo was characteristically nonchalant throughout the presen-
tation. He said landing in Challenger Deep was a little like reaching
the summit of Everest. At first, he was just relieved. “You think, Oh,
thank god. Now I can stop worrying. Then you get that sense of, Wo w, th i s
is historic. Then, it’s like: OK, now I can explore. I’m on the bottom of the
Mariana Trench, alone, in a submarine. How cool is that?”
James Cameron had told him to expect a “lifeless moonscape,” and
while the topography fit that description, Vescovo did see things crawl-
ing around on the floor, including what Jamieson and his research team
think is a new species of amphipod (a shrimplike crustacean). He also
saw clear evidence of human waste: a piece of trash half-covered in silt.
And, to the shock of the ship’s scientists,By the time Vescovo
attempts the last Five
Deeps dive in the Arctic’s
Molloy Deep, his submers-
ible will have made some
40 underwater trips—
though its creators say the
vehicle could make thou-
sands more journeys over
its lifetime. —MRDive 5: Arctic
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Burj
Khalifas