More people have travelled to the moon than the Earth's ocean floor – Victor Vescovo is determined to change that From 1843mag
bobbed in the Atlantic swell. Gleaming white, with a hull the shape of a hip flask, its lights gave the water an otherworldly glow. Stooping slightly inside the crew compartment – a snug titanium sphere 1.5 metres across with two white leather seats and three portholes the size of dinner plates – Victor Vescovo looked into the gloom. Eight kilometres below him, at the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench, lay his destination: the Brownson Deep, the deepest point in the Atlantic.
But now, with the Puerto Rico Trench yawning beneath him, the whole enterprise was in jeopardy. For five days thehad failed to launch. The first dive was called off when water began to trickle in from the inner hatch. Leaks on submarines are not the catastrophe you might assume; as the submarine descends, the increasing pressure tends to close any gaps tight. But at Hadal depths, that wasn’t worth the risk. On the second attempt, the leak persisted.
That evening the expedition crew gathered around the long central table in mission control. The mood was tense. Sonar depth charts lit up a bank of displays overhead. After talking through the risks with Lahey and his team, Vescovo agreed to one last attempt. If that didn’t work he would call off the expedition. Triton’s engineers worked through the night. They replaced the hatch seal with a new, softer rubber, fixed the camera and rewired faulty circuits.
Everest conquered, he set out for the Poles. That was a different type of gruelling experience: desolate, alien. In the pitiless cold it felt like an entire continent was against him. “The North Pole is much harder,” he says. “It’s moving, so you go to sleep and when you wake up you’re farther away than when you started. If anything gets wet, or you sweat, you cannot dry it out. It’s impossible.”
He had honed his discipline in the navy. Piloting the sub, he said, “isn’t exactly like flying, but it rhymes”. The maxims were the same: live by the checklist; carve the routines into muscle memory; never get complacent. “There shouldn’t be heroics,” he said. “If there are heroics on an expedition, someone screwed up. It’s just like war: when you see a soldier with a whole bunch of medals, it’s like, ‘boy, you must have had some shitty commanders’.
Another engineer, drenched in oil, was repairing the robotic arm. “You can’t step into Walmart and buy those parts,” said Lahey. “Everything has to be made, designed, tested.” The titanium for the crew compartment was 9cm thick, he explained, milled to a 99.933% perfect sphere to evenly distribute pressure. The tolerances were so fine that the forge inhad to develop a new manufacturing method. Any less could risk structural weakness and a fatal implosion.
He no longer worried about his own safety. “It’s a titanium sphere that’s bolted together. It would take God himself to try and crack that thing,” Vescovo said. “The most dangerous thing would be if there is some major collision and pieces of the foam sheared off. Then all of a sudden, I’m negatively buoyant and I can’t get back up. But the possibility is just so remote.”
In his office the expedition’s leader, Rob McCallum, watched the weather charts intently. A low-pressure system was mustering off New Zealand, threatening the dive. “It could get a little sporty,” he said. A veteran of countless dive expeditions, McCallum was used to managing wealthy clients. “It’s my job to be brutally honest,” he explained. The job required tact, and patience. “I’m on a crusade against ego. Ego gets people in trouble.”That evening McCallum gathered the crew in mission control.
The sonar team had produced the first detailed maps of several trenches, which Vescovo pledged to share with the Seabed 2030 project, an international effort to map the sea floor. “First people to do Java, San Cristobal, Santa Cruz, Tonga. Even if we do one dive, at least we’ve got something to go on. It does have an extraordinarily high value to it,” Jamieson said. “It’s just a shame,” he added, that they hadn’t done more.
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