Deeper and down

Jacques Piccard has died. I remember reading about his exploits in the Trieste when I was quite small (maybe there was something in the Eagle, or perhaps a Readers Digest piece). Like most small boys I loved the idea of superlatives, of going deeper than anyone had gone or (as far as we know) could go. And at a time when space exploration had barely begun, Piccard and Walsh had explored the most alien environment ever visited. One could argue that that is still the case, in terms of actual human visitors at least. To outdo the bottom of the Marianas Trench in sheer weirdness one has to go, I would suggest, to the moons of the outer planets. Piccard's book on the voyage Seven Miles Down (written with Robert S Dietz) is a great read.

And it's only while researching this post that I discovered that a rebuilt version of the Trieste located the remains of the USS Thresher, victim of the worst submarine accident of all time when she sank during deep sea trials. And only while reading the Wikipedia artcle on the Thresher did I discover that a condition of Bob Ballard's US Naval funding for the location of the Titanic was that he first carry out a seabed survey of the debris from the Thresher (and the Scorpion, another sunken nuclear sub).