“If they were on land, they’d be one of the wonders of the world. It contains the entire ecosystem of marine plants, as well as the mammals and the fish that eat them. There was also a dead-man switch: an alarm went off if the pilot failed to check in with the ship, and if he failed to acknowledge the alarm the weights would automatically drop.“Whenever we had any significant failure of some kind, the only thing that mattered was why,” Vescovo said.
“Filled with trepidation, we steamed into the teeth of the area where, on the old maps, they used to write, ‘Here Be Monsters,’ ” Vescovo told me.On the forecastle deck, in the control room, a cheerful, brown-haired Texan named Cassie Bongiovanni sat before four large monitors, which had been bolted to the table. “Once he left the surface, I had no idea where he was,” Buckle said.Cassie Bongiovanni and her sonar assistants ended up mapping an area of the ocean floor about the size of Texas, most of which had never been surveyed.Steve Chappell, a Triton mechanic, was one of a few crew members assigned the role of “swimmer,” leaping into the water and disconnecting the towline from the Limiting Factor before it descended.On the Arctic and Antarctic dives, the swimmers wore dry suits; polar waters can induce gasping and vertigo, and even talented swimmers risk drowning within two minutes.After a series of failures, Vescovo came close to calling off the expedition. By now, there was a blizzard, and the ship was heaving in eighteen-foot waves.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”He climbed inside the Limiting Factor.
Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. That's a big number, Suzie.Sé contar hasta treinta y cinco mil. Then nothing.The Triton crew piled into the control room. Example: Write a seventy-five-cent check.
“It’s all the weird vessels we end up on, the work of hauling things in and out of the water.”When Jamieson contacted Heather Stewart, a marine geologist, and said that Vescovo wanted to dive to the deepest point of each ocean, she replied that there was a problem: nobody knew where those points were.In the beginning, the ship had no means of tracking the submarine underwater. There was no backup hull; an implosion would end the project. Some snailfish have antifreeze proteins, to keep them running in the cold. I know.
It had been built by the U.S. Navy to hunt Soviet military submarines, and recently repurposed to transport and launch Vescovo’s private one. “I think I’m just going to write this whole thing off as bad debt,” he said.By the end of the expedition, the ship and submarine crews had so perfected the launch and recovery that, even in rough seas, to an outsider it was like watching an industrial ballet.The crew quickly became accustomed to the expedition’s achievements. “I don’t want the sub anywhere near that fucking thing!”) Large rusticles flow out from the bow, showing the directions of undersea currents. Vescovo suggested naming the site of the lost landers the Bitter Deep.The Pressure Drop set off east, past a thirty-mile-long iceberg, for Cape Town, South Africa, to stop for fuel and food. “You would just end up totally tainted in the way you think,” he said. (“What a rusting heap of shit!” Lahey said. Seven weeks later, Jamieson received a letter from the Indonesian government, saying that his research-permit application had been rejected, “due to national security consideration.”Buckle sailed to Guam, with diversions for Bongiovanni to map the Yap and Palau Trenches.
The team would have to avoid hurricane season in the Atlantic, and monsoon season in the Pacific, and otherwise remain flexible, for when things inevitably went wrong.Lahey persuaded Vescovo to buy the U.S.N.S.
But I'm saying remember that feeling.' “I love it when clients come through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told this is impossible, but what do you think?’ ” he said to me.