![]() “We’ve only adequately studied 8 percent of the world oceans,” he says. But there will also be a need for putting humans down there to make direct observations.” Walsh, like Cameron, remains a passionate advocate for exploring the ocean. “The unmanned vehicles are going to be doing the heavy lifting in the future, studying the ocean trenches. “The very deepest places of the ocean will mainly be explored by un manned vehicles, but there will always be room for manned vehicles,” Walsh says. Hopefully, even more explorers will join Walsh and Cameron’s exclusive club. “When he came back up and opened the hatch, I was there and shook his hand and said, ‘Welcome to the club. I said have fun.” Walsh was also able to greet Cameron after the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER successfully made its dive and surfaced. “Just before he shut the hatch to make the dive, I said, ‘Good luck and have fun,’” he says. He had a team of 30 technical people that designed and built the thing.” After Cameron squeezed into the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER for the descent, Walsh gave him one piece of advice. So I was just kind of there as an adviser, but not a contemporary adviser. Or what kind of problem did you run into with this. He’d say how did you do this or how did you do that. “But it’s the way it all came together, the final design and configuration of the thing.” Spanning a Generation of Exploration More than 50 years after his record-setting descent, Walsh became a part of Cameron’s DEEPSEA CHALLENGE team. There were no catalogues or companies that specialized in providing components for deep submersibles.”įor Walsh, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER is a perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. If you needed something, you had to design it and build it. “We didn’t have very good stuff then,” Walsh says. But there, most of the similarities end, because you are talking about a half century of technology.” Some features of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER-including its lights and cameras-would have been beneficial had they existed in 1960. They are capable of withstanding great pressures. They carry people down to the deepest place in the ocean. That’s like asking Orville Wright what was the difference between your airplane and a 747,” he says. “People ask me what were the differences between the Trieste and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. “Once you look at it and see it, you realize it’s pretty simple.” Walsh is quick to note that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER is far more technologically advanced than the sub he and Piccard used. Everybody thinks, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” he says. He was impressed by the simplicity of the vessel’s design. ![]() “I think pretty much a free balloon that would fly in the sky-except the balloon part was sausage-shaped rather than spherical because that’s an easier shape to tow,” Walsh says. Attached to the bottom of the Trieste was a small, pressure-resistant sphere with enough room for just two people. The Trieste, in contrast, was designed like a hot air balloon, with a cylindrical top section composed of a float filled with gasoline and water to lift the vessel back to the surface after the dive. The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER resembles a rocket-a narrow, vertically oriented tube. Designed by Piccard, the Trieste looks vastly different from the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. Piccard died in 2008, but Walsh is still involved in ocean research and was a key adviser on Cameron’s team. Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard reached the Challenger Deep in a submersible called the Trieste. Cameron used an innovative, sophisticated submersible, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. On March 26, 2012, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron made history by becoming the first person to make a solo dive to the deepest known part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, nearly 11 kilometers (7 miles) below the water’s surface.
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