#Challenger deep professional#
#Challenger deep crack#

'I forgot to hit stop, and I'm just typing away,' Loranger says. After an initial chaotic slew of sound, several distinct echoes can be heard, each slightly quieter than the last until they peter out into silence. With field work stymied by the pandemic, he was hoping to find something useful in the recording. Six years later, Loranger sat at his desk listening to the reverberations from the blast. 'It became very obvious right away that it was gone,' Barclay says of the destroyed instrument.

The sound from all this activity raced through the water, careening off the surface then returning back to the depths of the ocean-where Mark II was listening. Barclay speculates that one of the instrumentвЂ™s small ceramic floats may have failed, triggering a cascade of destruction.ДЄs the instrument's glass collapsed under the weight of five miles of water, it released a pocket of air that oscillated under pressure before splintering into a veil of tiny bubbles. A rush of noise cut through the silence, a cacophony created by the implosion below of the Mark III. The scientists heaved Deep Sound Mark II back onto the ship and listened to its recording. They found only one bobbing in the waves. That evening, still unsure of what had happened, he and the crew peered out across the ocean surface at the appointed hour to retrieve the instruments. You don't know what it's doing for that whole time.'Д®ver prepared, Barclay had set up the ship's onboard underwater microphone to record at the surface, occasionally listening in for clues to what was happening below. 'You pull the rope and release it, and it's gone,' Barclay says. But once they disappeared from sight, there were few ways to track their progress. The other, Deep Sound Mark III, was intended to reach the ocean bottom.

One, known as Deep Sound Mark II, would travel to 9,000 meters down. The pair was programmed to descend to a certain depth and linger, recording the oceanic symphony before returning to the surface. Barclay's two devices were part of this long history of exploration. Other scientists have sent remotely operated vehicles to this abyss or measured the great depths from the surface using sonar. But the window held, and Piccard and Walsh arrived safely in Challenger Deep, lingering for 20 minutes before ascending.

#Challenger deep crack#

As the Trieste neared the seafloor, the plunging temperature fractured a plexiglass window, sending a loud crack through the cramped cabin. The first were Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and United States Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh, who descended on board the bathyscaphe submersible Trieste on January 23, 1960. Only a few people have ever visited Challenger Deep. Miles of water overhead create crushing pressure, which bears down in Challenger Deep at eight tons per square inch, or roughly a thousand times the pressure at the surface. However, there are always things that are out of Barclay's control.Д®xploring our planet's greatest depths isn't easy. 'But it's a really good exercise to do.'Д®numerating the possible routes to failure helps Barclay avoid human-caused catastrophes, such as forgetting to charge an instrument battery or failing to turn on a device. The night before each big deployment, he writes up a list of everything that could go wrong. This paranoia leads him to meticulous preparation.

#Challenger deep professional#

'At its most basic, that's what every scientist is trying to do.' Professional paranoiaД«arclay, who is now an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, describes himself as 'professionally paranoid'-a natural disposition after a career spent tossing expensive equipment off ships. 'What's the tallest mountain? What's the driest desert? What's the spiciest pepper?' Such efforts help expand the limits of human knowledge, he adds. 'We like to know the extremes of the planet,' says study author Scott Loranger, an acoustical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Scientists have long known that Challenger Deep is the ocean's deepest point, but they've spent decades working to pin down precisely where and how far down its deepest spot lies.