(The complete story of the bathyscaph Trieste from the 194...)
The complete story of the bathyscaph Trieste from the 1948 dives of the FNRS-2 off Dakar to the 1960 seven-mile dive in the Challenger Deep off Guam. The story covers the Trieste's European-sponsred dives off Italy (1953-1956), the Office of Naval Research-sponsored Mediterranean dives in 1957 leading to the purchase of the Trieste by the Navy, subsequent dives off San Diego, and finally the ultradeep dives of Project Nekton.
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explorer oceanographer scientist
Jacques Piccard was born in Brussels, Belgium to Auguste Piccard, who was himself an adventurer and engineer. Explorer Jacques Piccard comes from a family known for their daring achievements and has added to the family name through his own record-setting feats.
He began with the aeronautical exploits of his father, Auguste, a physicist who became interested in balloons as a way of studying cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere.
Jacques Piccard began studying economics at the University of Geneva in 1943 but interrupted his studies to serve in the French First Army during World War II.
After his service in World War II, he taught at the University of Geneva while continuing to help his father improve the bathyscaphe and demonstrate its potential for operating in deep waters. The first working model was built with money from a Belgian scientific foundation in 1948. After a successful unmanned trial descent to 4, 600 feet, it was damaged in heavy seas and had to be redesigned. Another was built in 1953 and purchased by the French Navy. At the request of the city of Trieste, Italy, a third vessel was built in 1954 and taken by the Piccards to a record depth of 10, 355 feet in the Mediterranean off the island of Ponza, Italy.
With this success, the younger Piccard abandoned economics to collaborate with his father on further improving the bathyscaphe and demonstrating its practicality for exploration and research. In 1956, Piccard sought outside financial support from the U. S. Navy, which was exploring the potential uses of submersibles like the bathyscaphe in underwater research. He was invited to bring the vessel, now named Trieste, to San Diego to work with scientists there on the biological and acoustical properties of deep scattering layers, areas of sound reflection that seemed to vary at different depths and in different lighting conditions.
Two years later, the Navy bought the vessel and hired Piccard as a consultant. Recognizing the strategic value of a workable submersible for submarine salvage and rescue, the Navy began testing Trieste at greater and greater depths. In her first 17 months as a naval vessel, the Trieste made 22 descents and broke three depth records. Following a successful descent to 24, 000 feet, Piccard and his colleagues planned an even greater challenge-a voyage to the bottom of the sea.
Early on January 23, 1960, Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh, a submarine officer, boarded the vessel in rough seas near Guam and began a descent to 36, 000 feet in a chasm of the Marianas Trench known as Challenger Deep. The bathyscaphe carried no equipment and planned no experiments; the mission's purpose was merely to prove that the depth could be reached. The descent progressed without incident until 30, 000 feet, when the crew heard a loud crack. They continued the dive, however, finally touching down in "snuff-colored ooze" at 35, 800 feet. To Walsh, the experience was like "being in a big bowl of milk. " When they finally settled on the featureless seabed, they saw a flat fish as well as a new type of shrimp. Marine biologists later disputed their observations, claiming that no fish could survive the 17, 000 psi pressure at such depths.
After discovering cracks in the viewing windows, Piccard cut the voyage short. After a 20-minute stay on the bottom, they began dumping ballast for their return to the surface, and the damaged vessel returned to its escort ships without incident. The historic dive received worldwide attention, and Piccard wrote an account of it, Seven Miles Down, with Robert Deitz, a renowned geologist who had help plan the mission. A planned return expedition, however, never occurred. The Trieste was expensive to maintain and operate. It was incapable of collecting samples and could not take photographs and so had little scientific data to show for its voyages. The original vessel was retired in 1961, although a rebuilt version later located the lost remains of two lost nuclear submarines, Thresher and Scorpion.
Following the success of the bathyscaphe, Auguste and Jacques then began developing a "mesoscaphe" - a ship that could operate at depths of up to 2, 000 feet. Piccard envisioned it as a tourist submarine, and the first mesoscaphe, Auguste Piccard, carried more than 30, 000 passengers into Lake Geneva at the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964-65.
Working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Piccard then developed a second vessel, the Ben Franklin, for the Gulf Stream Mission, which studied the physical and biological features of the Gulf Stream on its month-long voyage from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1969. His account of that voyage was published in The Sun Beneath the Sea. During the 1970's, Piccard formed the Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes and began warning about the dangers of pollution and overfishing. His new submersibles included Forel, launched in 1979, which made more than 700 dives in European lakes for scientific, industrial, and recovery missions.
Although he continued his research for governments, universities, and the police, his efforts in later years included developing passenger vessels. He developed more than 40 innovative designs for commercial sightseeing submersibles, of which half a dozen were built. Piccard also became a founder of the Exploration Society of America, an international travel group.
Political attention and funding were soon diverted from ocean exploration to the space race, and the benefits of deep-sea expeditions were not believed to offset their enormous costs. The Japanese unmanned submersible Kaiko approached Piccard's depth record in another part of the Marianas Trench in 1995, and several international efforts are in progress to take innovative new manned craft to the Challenger Deep before the end of the century.
Piccard continues to develop and build submersibles, partly as a way of increasing awareness of environmental threats to the world's seas. In 1996, he expressed a concern that the sea is now severely endangered and can only be saved by widescale changes in attitudes toward overfishing and pollution.
He was one of the fathers of marine exploration and a pioneer of ocean engineering. He was one of the first people to explore the deepest part of the world's ocean, and the deepest location on the surface of Earth's crust, the Mariana Trench, located in the western North Pacific Ocean. Jacques Piccard constructed four submarines and applied for at least one US patent (D200, 506) for a submarine.
He was awarded the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1972.
Meanwhile, the Piccard family legacy of adventure and exploration is being continued by his son Bertrand, who received international attention in 1997-98 for his participation in several team attempts to circle the globe by balloon. The family was also featured in a 1997 public television series, "The Adventurers. " Piccard lives in Cully, Switzerland.
(The complete story of the bathyscaph Trieste from the 194...)
Quotations:
He remains optimistic, however, that a new generation of deep-sea exploration technology may enable humans to return to the Challenger Deep: "We opened the door, and now we must go and see what's behind the door. "
"For me, " he says, " the more people discover the sea, the greater the chance of bringing marine issues into public view and the better off we will all be. "
