What does it look like to conquer the abyss of the ocean?

"Abyss" is a common saying used to describe extreme depth. Is there really such a deep place in the world? Mathematically speaking, ten thousand feet is 30,000 meters. In today's world, there are obviously no such inaccessible places. However, there are several "10,000-meter abyss". The six famous trenches in the world can be called "10,000-meter abyss". Among them, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean can be called the "10,000-meter abyss". This is a trench 2,550 kilometers long, 70 kilometers wide, and most of the way above 10,000 meters. It is like an arc-shaped bow, deeply embedded in the crust on the east side of the Mariana Islands. Its maximum depth is 11,034 meters, and it was named "Challenger's Pit" to call on those brave and fearless explorers to challenge it.

With the discovery of "Challenger Deep", the work of detecting the deepest abyss in the world has also set off a "deep exploration craze" just like polar exploration. The most eye-catching one is the first deep-diving activity of the American deep submersible "Trieste". This is a life-and-death adventure. Although the divers are "protected" by a 12-centimetre-thick hard-walled diving chamber, it is indeed frightening to have to break through the threat of more than 11,000 atmospheric pressures below 10,000 meters and every square centimeter. Trembling. If something goes wrong, the submarine may be damaged, or even people and belongings may be crushed into "meat patties". On January 23, 1960, two American scientists, Bicart and Walsh, embarked on an underwater exploration aboard the Trieste. After careful and long-term sneaking, he finally reached the deepest point in the world - the bottom of the Challenger Pit, and then returned to the sea safely. This was a major event in the history of world ocean exploration and became the beginning of mankind revealing the secrets of the deep sea. However, do you know that the arrival of this moment was achieved through the hard work and sacrifices of many explorers?

The bottom of the sea is unpredictable

In today’s world of rich geographical knowledge and advanced science and technology, it is not difficult to answer the question of the boundaries and depth of the sea. But for our ancestors, this was a problem. Bai Juyi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty, described the great rivers and mountains in his legendary style. Facing the mysterious and unpredictable ocean, he could only sigh in confusion: "The sea is long, straight down, bottomless and boundless!" In fact, there was more than just one Bai Juyi. Over the past thousands of years, many people have People cry out: In the vast sea, where is the boundary? Where is the bottom?

For this reason, many tempting legends have been circulated, and the "Dragon Palace under the Sea" has almost become a well-known myth. Some brave wise men have conducted thousands of expeditions for this purpose. When they failed, they often cast a mysterious color on the ocean. It was not until Columbus discovered the New World in the 15th century that a wave of ocean exploration craze began on the earth, confirming the theory of a round earth and that the oceans are bounded. But its inner world is difficult to see through because it is separated by a layer of sea water.

During the period of geographical discovery that shocked the world, many ocean explorers tried to figure out how deep the ocean was, but due to limitations of technical conditions, they achieved little success. The method they used was very simple. A person stood on the bow of the ship, holding a long rope in his hand, with a hammer-shaped iron block or lead block tied to one end. When the weight touched the bottom of the sea, the length of the rope was recorded, which is the sea level. deep. This method is very inaccurate. Sometimes the rope has been bitten by a shark while the measurer is still lowering it. The maximum sea depth measured by this method was recorded by the British expedition ship "Challenger" in the Mariana Islands in 1875, which measured 8,148 meters.

Later, an instrument that used sound waves to measure sea depth was invented, called an echo sounder. This instrument is placed on a ship and sends an acoustic signal to the depths of the ocean. When the sound wave passes through the seawater and reaches the bottom of the sea, it returns along the original path and the sounder receives the sound wave. Because the ocean is of different depths, the sound waves travel different distances back and forth. Today, the ocean depths marked on various maps are all recorded using echo sounding. Through it, the mountains, valleys, hills and plains on the seabed are all vividly displayed on the paper, correcting all the wrong imaginations in the past.

But these are not enough to quench the thirst of those who are searching for the origin. Biologists want to know if there are any living things in the 10,000-meter abyss? Geologists want to know if there are minerals and oil there? The desire to explore the mysteries of nature gave them the same ideal to go to the abyss to see for themselves. For many years, the slogan of marching into the deep sea has inspired explorers to move forward, leaving behind many touching and thrilling stories.

It’s as difficult as climbing to the sky

The ancient divers-frogmen, mostly naked, used their extraordinary underwater mobility to hold their breath and dive into the ocean to collect pearls or seafood. Then return to the surface to breathe and rest. Due to limitations of physiological conditions, they can operate in water depths of 20 to 30 meters at most. Some people say that the difficulties encountered by divers are more serious than those encountered by astronauts, and this is absolutely true. Because the most uncomfortable thing for astronauts riding in a spacecraft is the weightlessness after leaving the earth's gravity. Divers will encounter a variety of complex problems in the seawater world. If people want to directly enter the depths of the ocean, they must overcome several difficulties: The first is breathing.

We all know that fish live freely in the water. The key is that fish use their gills to breathe oxygen in the water, while humans can only live on land and use their lungs to breathe air. Unless there are special artificial gills that allow humans to breathe oxygen in the water like fish, humans can freely enter the ocean. Some scientists tried to work on this aspect and conducted experiments with mice and dogs. Although the theory was proved to be valid, the effect was not great. It seems that there is still a long way to go before artificial gill respiration can be fully realized.

Another method is to bring breathable gas underwater. We know that air is composed of nitrogen and oxygen, so the earliest divers were equipped with a nitrogen-oxygen mixture. Practice has proven that nitrogen-oxygen mixture is also unsafe for divers. As the diving depth increases, the oxygen content in the diver's lungs gradually decreases, and on the contrary, nitrogen increases. Once nitrogen enters human tissue and blood, it will have an anesthetic effect on the diver, making the diver lose consciousness and control as if he was drunk. This pathology is called "nitrogen narcosis" or deep water anesthesia. A large amount of diving experience shows that when divers breathe air, once the diving depth exceeds 50 meters, the degree of nitrogen narcosis poisoning will intensify, turning into a dangerous state or causing death. To ensure the safety of naked diving, many countries set the depth limit of "air diving" to 50 meters. Even for competitive athletes, the world record for naked diving is only 101 meters, which was set by 53-year-old Mayor of France in 1981. The outstanding weakness of this deep diving method is that the underwater stay time is short, people still suffer, and unfortunately they encounter sharks and even lose their lives. Obviously, this method is not feasible to reach the abyss of 10,000 meters, just like traveling to the Moon Palace on foot is not feasible.

Later, scientists found a helium-oxygen mixture. The use of this gas, with the help of diving equipment, has enabled humans to dive deeper than the 300-meter mark. In 1970, the French dived to the bottom of 501 meters and stayed for 4 hours. It seems that it is more realistic to start by solving the problem of underwater breathing gases for divers than to imitate artificial gills. The second is pressure.

We who live on land are usually only subject to one atmosphere of pressure. Once we enter the water, the pressure increases by one atmosphere for every 10 meters above water. If it is at a depth of 300 meters, it will have to withstand a heavy pressure of 30 atmospheres. In this special heavy-pressure environment, gases such as helium and nitrogen that people breathe have been dissolved inside human tissues. If a diver suddenly floats to the surface from a heavy-pressure environment at a depth of 300 meters, the heavy pressure on the human body will suddenly weaken. This rapid reduction in pressure causes the dissolved gases in the diver's blood and body cells to be released immediately, forming small bubbles. This is decompression sickness.

The characteristics of this disease are: bubbles form in the skin, causing an itchy feeling; bubbles stay in the joints, often causing joint pain, headache, vomiting and other symptoms; bubbles in the nerves If it appears in the tissue, it will cause paralysis of the whole body and even death. And if you ascend slowly and gradually adapt to the environment on land, you won't get decompression sickness.

Naked diving is not feasible, and deep-sea exploration must be completed with more reliable and complete equipment. The curiosity of exploring the sea has prompted people to explore and invent various devices that are beneficial to deep diving, and they have experienced a long process from the advent of diving bells to diving suits and deep submersibles.

In 332 AD, the ancient Greek inventor Aristotle turned a bucket upside down and asked divers to put the bucket on their heads, cover their entire bodies in the bucket, and then dive upright into the deep sea. In this way, the air in the barrel allows the diver to breathe for much longer than holding his breath. Because the diving barrel he painted resembled the shape of a bell in a temple, it was called a diving bell and is still used today.

Unfortunately, this method of diving was not taken seriously and developed until the 16th century. In 1531, Professor Loreda of Italy designed a barrel-shaped diving bell. After the successful diving, the enthusiasm of many scientists was stimulated. Some expanded the outer cover of the diving bell, and some opened small windows on the top of the cover for observation. Among the many improvements, the greatest was made by French physicist Denis Pepin. He thought that in the past, the air reserve in the bell was limited, and the carbon dioxide exhaled by divers could not be discharged, which often caused people to suffocate. If the diving bell can be continuously supplied with air, the danger will be eliminated. So he invented the air supply method of installing a long pipe on the top of the bell and connecting it to the bellows mouth of the ship on the sea. Later, someone invented a diving bell that used an air pump to supply air, which greatly increased the diving depth.

However, divers soon felt that they were not free to move around in the diving bell. It would be great if they could carry an air supply device with them and move freely on the seabed. The advent of various Scuba made this fantasy a reality.

Please don’t misunderstand, Scuba is not a person’s name, but the abbreviation of the word “diver’s own air supply device”. The Chinese took advantage of this and marked out the pronunciation of the English letters in Chinese, thus pronouncing Scuba. Although various Scuba diving suits developed in the 16th century extended the time that divers could stay on the seabed, their snorkels, which relied on the sea surface for air supply, had two fatal weaknesses: First, the length of the snorkel was limited, which restricted Second, the snorkel is easily scratched by obstacles, which will put the diver's life in danger. Many subsequent inventors attempted to get rid of the "air supply tail".

It was not until 1865 that the "self-contained" diving suit developed in France completely solved this problem. This is to design a pressure-resistant metal cylinder. A pump is used to press air into the cylinder to a pressure of 40 atmospheres. A hose is used to connect the cylinder air reservoir and the breathing mask, and there is an air volume regulating valve in the middle. On the inside of the regulator, a membrane is installed to withstand the pressure of the seawater outside. This kind of diving suit allows divers to move freely underwater and becomes an immortal event in the history of human diving.

However, until the 1930s, whether humans were riding a diving bell or wearing a diving suit, the two major obstacles of nitrogen poisoning of underwater breathing gases and deep water pressure limited the ability of deep diving. depth. The advent of various submersibles is really good news for people who think about the depths of the ocean. In 1929, the world's first practical "deep submersible", the "Progress Century", was launched. It was a steel ball with a wall thickness of 32 mm and a diameter of 145 cm. The next year, several scientists took it and dived to a depth of 435 meters. In 1934, he dived to a depth of 923 meters. Although this depth is still far from the ocean abyss that humans have ever explored, it is still inspiring. In 1949, the newly developed diving ball could dive to a depth of 1,375 meters, which is still the highest record for a deep-diving device tied with a steel cable.

But people found that this kind of deep submersible still failed to achieve its purpose, because all such deep submersible devices have the same weakness: they rely on thick and heavy steel cables to connect to the surface ship. As a result, it cannot move freely and cannot overcome the difficulty of growing the steel cable caused by the increase in depth. Its deep diving distance cannot exceed 2,000 meters. At a time when the development of deep submersibles was in a dilemma, the famous atmospheric explorer and Swiss physicist Albicat was determined to turn to deep-sea exploration and create a submersible that could walk independently without steel cables and be suitable for the abyss of the ocean. submersible.

"Explorer 2"

A.Bikater was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1884. He graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and became a professor at the University of Brussels at the age of 20. The era that Bikart lived in was an era of invention and creation, an era full of scientific adventures and miracles, and he was worthy of being a pioneer of this era. His motto is: "There should be adventure in life!" He always works tirelessly and fearlessly rushes to the pinnacle of contemporary science.

At that time, he was interested in atmospheric exploration, which was popular in Europe. He had just set foot in this field. At that time, the basket-type balloon encountered technical difficulties. The severe cold at high altitude and the thin air blocked the situation. The road to liftoff. Bikart used his unique talent to create an aluminum sealed cabin instead of a gondola, overcoming the threats to the crew from severe cold and thin gas, and advancing to higher altitudes. In 1913, he set a record of 16 kilometers of vertical lift in a balloon he designed himself. He spent 16 hours comfortably and safely in a closed cabin and conducted a large number of scientific investigations. This success made him famous in this era of talented people.

Bikater, who has the courage to explore, has had the dream of entering the ocean since he was a child. Even when he was exploring the atmosphere, he did not give up the idea of ??knocking open the gantry on the bottom of the sea. In 1933, at an exhibition in Chicago, USA, he met Bibby, who was engaged in deep-sea exploration. Bibby introduced him to the wonders of the deep sea and the difficulties faced by his deep-sea diving ball. Bikart was both pleased with the explorer's achievements and worried about the immediate difficulties of increasing the depth of the dive. From then on, he decided to turn to the research of ocean bathyscaphe as soon as possible.

The deep submersibles at that time faced two major problems: First, as the depth increased, the spherical shell thickened and gained weight, so the deep diving ball itself no longer had positive buoyancy and had to be hung with ropes; As the depth increases, the cable becomes longer and heavier, and the depth of the dive is limited by the strength of the cable. His dual character of inventor and explorer, his extensive knowledge and rich practice enabled him to recreate the wonders of the world created during high-altitude exploration in deep-sea exploration.

He boldly transplanted the principle of balloons and sealed cabins to the technical improvement center of deep submersibles, formed the principles of buoyancy and ballast, and created a new generation of self-propelled deep submersibles, namely underwater balloons. Its principle is: a steel diving ball is connected to a boat-like buoy, and the buoy is filled with light gasoline that is much smaller than the specific gravity of seawater to generate buoyancy for the deep submersible; at the same time, the deep diving ball Iron sand is put inside as ballast to help it sink. When it needs to float, just open the solenoid valve and throw away some ballast. By taking these two measures, the deep submersible can float and sink independently in the ocean at any depth. For the first time, it threw away the tow cable and air supply pipe on its head and became a specially designed submersible that can sail freely in the deep sea.

The outbreak of World War II delayed Bikart's deep-diving plan. It was not until 1948 that his first deep-sea submersible was built, named "Explorer 2", and became a famous sounding balloon. No.'s twin sister. "Explorer 2" has a wall thickness of 9 centimeters and a pressure-resistant diameter of 2 meters. Its pontoon can hold 80 cubic meters of gasoline and can provide sufficient buoyancy. The first trial of the deep submersible carries huge risks, because it is the first time that humans have dived without relying on mooring cables. If it fails, it will be buried in the sea forever. Bikart, who was determined to devote himself to scientific exploration, once again put his life and death at risk and personally took the "Explorer 2" to dive. After reaching a depth of 25 meters, he returned to the sea safely.

On November 3, 1948, near the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa, "Explorer 2" was preparing for its first deep dive test. Due to strong wind and waves, the test had to be postponed until the afternoon. This is an unmanned dive. A set of automatic navigation equipment is installed on the deep submersible for timing control. When it reaches the predetermined depth, it will automatically abandon the load and surface. At 15:45, "Explorer 2" was hoisted into the blue water. After untying the rope, it slowly sank and disappeared into the waves after a while. Bicart and everyone else who participated in the experiment stared uneasily at the water, waiting for its return.

44 minutes later, cheers rang out on the ship. It was a success. The bathyscaphe reappeared on the sea surface, and the depth indicator read 1,373 meters.

Due to the tossing of wind and waves, the floating body containing gasoline was partially damaged, the observation window leaked slightly, and a few drops of water entered the pressure chamber. As a result, some reports say that Bikart's experiment failed. Bikater analyzed soberly: The damaged part of the floating body is not strong enough to withstand the impact of waves. The floating body structure should be strengthened in the future; the observation window leaks a little, indicating that the sealing is not tight; but the pressure-resistant cabin has withstood the test of high pressure. . The success gave Bikart greater confidence in deep-sea exploration, and the shortcoming became a new starting point for him to tackle key problems.

Bikater had a new blueprint for future deep submersibles. He developed an improved "Explorer 3" and built it in Toulon, France. In 1953, it carried the Bikarts to a depth of 3,048 meters. In 1954, another deep diving record of 4,050 meters was set, paving the way for humans to reach the underwater abyss.

"Trieste" showed its prowess

The Bikarts did not meet the deep diving record of breaking the 4,000-meter mark, but took advantage of the victory and headed towards the abyss of the world. After several years of painstaking design, a new type of deep submersible was finally developed.

It consists of two parts: a manned steel ball and a buoy. The manned steel ball has a diameter of 2.13 meters and a wall thickness of 9 centimeters; the buoy is shaped like a special submarine, 15.1 meters long and 3.5 meters wide, with a maximum speed of 4 knots; it can accommodate 2 to 3 scientific explorers. When Bikart was designing, based on the steel material and craftsmanship at the time, the maximum working depth was expected to be 6,000 meters. Because it was manufactured in the Italian city of Trieste, it was named "Trieste".

The cautious Bikart father and son did not rush to the deep sea. Instead, they continued to increase the depth of the shallow sea area to test various technical indicators. They drove it personally. Dozens of test data showed that this The performance of the new deep submersible is reliable.

In 1958, Bikart and his son once again performed for navies and oceanographers from various countries on the Trieste. An American asked Bikart: How deep can it dive? He answered readily and without thinking: "It can go down to the bottom of the sea, no matter how deep it is!" This resounding answer surprised everyone present. The next day, the news appeared in the newspapers: The Bikarts challenged the abyss of the ocean on behalf of mankind.

After the "Trieste" first tested its potential, the U.S. Navy was interested in purchasing it at a high price. At first, Bikart did not agree, but because their personal funds had dried up and they were unable to maintain this expensive deep-diving test, Bikart had no choice but to reluctantly give up and transfer the patent rights to the U.S. Navy. At this time, the elder Bikater was getting older, and the burden of conducting the experiment fell on the younger Bikater's shoulders.

Jay Bicart was born in 1922. He inherited the family tradition of scientists from an early age and determined to devote himself to deep-sea exploration. In the 1940s, he became his father's right-hand man. In the 1950s, he assisted his father in designing a bathyscaphe and served as its pilot. He gradually became famous in deep-sea exploration. Therefore, he went to the United States with the "Trieste" to complete his father's unfinished business.

Under the leadership of Jay Bicart, the Trieste dived to a depth of 5,600 meters in 1958 and to a depth of 7,315 meters the following year. In this way, the experimental team formulated the "Plankton Plan" to go to the bottom of the deepest abyss of the ocean.

On January 21, 1960, the unprecedented "Operation Plankton" in human history began. The American cruiser USS Lewis sailed majestically to the surface of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean and sprinted towards the Challenger Deep. The leader of the project, Dr. Rechnice, personally used the explosion sound source sounding method to find the deepest point. He dropped about 80,000 kilograms of yellow explosives into the trench. After countless records and calculations, he finally found the deepest point at 8 a.m. two days later. It took 14 seconds for people to receive an echo after throwing explosives into the deep sea, which is the longest time ever. According to the propagation speed of sound waves in sea water, the sea depth was measured to be 10,058 meters. Therefore, the "Trieste" will dive here.

On January 23, 1960, Jay Bicart and U.S. Navy Captain Walsh, who played the protagonists of this adventure, towed the "Trieste" by boat to the Abyss of Ten Thousand Words. On the ocean surface. That day, the weather was not beautiful, the wind was strong, and the waves were as high as 5 meters. But two brave scientific explorers resolutely decided that no matter how bad the weather was, they would go to the earth's abyss cracks-the trench to see what happened. They were very excited when they entered the pressure chamber steel ball with a diameter of 2 meters, a wall thickness of 12.7 centimeters and a pressure of 1,500 atmospheres. They are about to travel to the abyss 10 kilometers below sea level. This is an even more amazing feat than climbing Mount Everest!

At 8:23 a.m., the "Trieste" began to dive, entering a permanently silent but also noisy underwater world. There are no winds and waves here, but there are occasional rapids. There is a lack of bright sunshine, but there are many strange marine creatures. What kind of world will it be as we go deeper? They were a little uneasy.

Ten minutes later, we dived to 91.5 meters and paused to adjust buoyancy and check instruments. Everything was normal, so we continued to dive cautiously. After crossing a depth of 200 meters, the changes in seawater temperature and density become smaller. There is already a dark world around it, and it finally stops staying and dives straight into the deep seabed.

In order to observe the marine luminous organisms as clearly as possible, they did not turn on the underwater lights. As a result, they only saw stars at two depths of 670 meters and 6100 meters. Groups of phosphorescent plankton looked out of the observation window. Fly by. Perhaps the strange appearance of the deep submersible disturbed them and scared the marine creatures who were used to living a peaceful life to flee. 75 minutes later, the submersible reached a depth of 1,600 meters and received a wireless call from the surface to inquire about the underwater situation. Communication was good. At a depth of 3,000 meters, we had another clear conversation with the water surface. ...and the dive went smoothly. Walsh observed through the observation window that the surrounding seawater changed from clear and transparent to gray and gradually turned into darkness as the temperature increased. At 11:30, when they reached a depth of 6,900 meters, Bikart turned on the searchlight. In the bright beam of light underwater, they saw nothing, as if they were in an ethereal and ethereal space.

When they dived to a depth of 9,000 meters, a sudden crackling sound alarmed the two warriors, and the pressure cabin also vibrated. Did it hit the bottom of the sea? No, it's still going down. Bikat had a premonition that a critical situation was coming. He quickly turned off all the instruments in the cabin. In the deathly silence, he only heard a slight crackling sound coming from the cabin wall. Are they shrimps crawling outside the steel shell? no. Should we continue diving, or should we stop there? This seems to be a choice between life and death. The situation is very urgent, and if it fails, you will be buried in this abyss. How can it not be frightening at this moment? However, they watched the development of the situation calmly. Five minutes passed, the crackling sound did not appear again, and all the instruments were operating normally. The two signaled to each other that they would never retreat.

When the dive reached a distance of 10,058 meters measured from the explosion sound source, the echo sounder still could not find the sound waves returning from the seabed. The two of you looked at me and I looked at you, puzzled. The dive continued until the echo sounder received echo waves at 10,668 meters. Bikater judged that they were still 300 meters from the bottom of the sea. The bathyscaphe descended slowly, and Walsh turned on all the lights, surrounded by a dark gray world. Suddenly, things like jellyfish and jellyfish appeared in Bikater's field of vision. The individuals were not big. When it came time to contact the surface, the call was disconnected. They felt extremely nervous at this moment, and everyone above and below the water was sweating.

At 1:06 p.m., the bathyscaphe finally completed its final journey. Its bottom gently touched the soft, light yellow seabed, bringing humans to the deepest abyss of the ocean, with a depth of 11,034 rice. Bikar grabbed the phone with excited hands and shouted. He had long forgotten that the phone was out of order. Did you know that there is a thick layer of seawater covering the top of the deep submersible, and the pressure it experiences is as much as 150,000 tons! No wonder its diameter was compressed by 1.5 mm when it surfaced.

In this world without the sun, the water is very cold, with a temperature of only 2.4 degrees Celsius. Under the illumination of the lamp, the two explorers saw with their own eyes that the soil here was yellow-brown and was made of diatom ooze. I found a flat fish about 30 centimeters long and 15 centimeters wide. Its eyes were slightly protruding and it soon got into the yellow mud. A red shrimp about 2.5 cm swam freely past the window, as if welcoming visitors. In people's eyes, these little lives are harder than steel. This is really an incredible miracle. In an instant, the debate over whether there was life in the abyss of ten thousand meters was solved. Later deep-sea explorers also saw lilies that were considered extinct in the past, lobe-finned fish that died out 60 million years ago, and some aquatic animals that even experienced marine biologists could not identify! This undoubtedly proves that life is not only active on land and in shallow water, but also in the ocean and the deepest part of the ocean.

This is the first time humans have reached the abyss, and they have a lot of work to do. In addition to testing the abyss seawater temperature to 3.3 degrees Celsius, it also tested that there is no water flow on the seabed and measured radioactive phenomena on the seabed in order to develop mineral resources on the seabed. Never discouraged at any time, Walsh picked up the phone and called: "We are reporting on the seabed that the depth of the Challenger Pit is 11,034 meters. The report is complete, please call back!" Suddenly, a smile appeared on his face. It turned out that the phone Finally connected, the sound from the bottom of the sea finally reached the surface. Immediately afterwards, news of the conquest of the deepest abyss of the ocean spread across news agencies across the United States and around the world.

It was later discovered that the interruption of the wireless call was caused by a group of plankton. They were so dense that they blocked the sound waves of communication, causing a false alarm to the people in contact.

When Walsh turned on the underwater light on the tail and looked out, he turned sharply and said to Carter: "I know what that little noise is about. It's the entrance channel." There was a sound on the observation window, and a crack appeared on it. "It turned out that the huge water pressure caused this terrible episode. In this high-pressure world of 1,100 atmospheres, the pressure chamber is bearing a total pressure of 150,000 tons. The diameter of the hard metal shell is compressed by 1.5 mm! The shrinkage of the metal grooves at the junction of the observation windows eventually caused cracks to appear on the plexiglass, which can be clearly seen under the light.

These two false alarms shortened the scientific investigation by reducing the stay time of the deep submersible on the seabed from the originally planned 30 minutes to 20 minutes. Bicart pressed the button to eject the ballast projectiles, and a bunch of iron pellets poured out from the lower part of the floating body, falling into the seabed sediments like talcum powder, splashing up a dust cloud, spreading and boiling upward.

Then, the deep submersible floated like a balloon.

Goodbye, Dust Cloud! Goodbye, "Challenger's Pit"! It took nearly three hours to surface. At 15:56, the "Trieste" finally surfaced. Fifteen minutes later, the two explorers climbed out of the pressure chamber and stood on the deck of the deep submersible. The American plane was circling at low altitude. After discovering the "Trieste" floating up, it immediately fired a salute and swayed its wings to pay tribute to the heroes! In the distance, a destroyer came rushing in to welcome the explorers who had returned with great honors.

The journey is far from over

Later, when people asked Jay Bicart what he thought of his trip to the Mariana Trench, he proudly said: "We found the way into the sea. The key to the door, mankind conquered the deep sea." Bikart's answer was not an exaggeration. People still remember that when the plane took off into the sky, some scientists sighed: There is a way to the sky, but there is no way to the sea. Now, people no longer have to worry about having no way to enter the sea. The key to the door to the sea is brave people combined with advanced technology.

Yes, deep-sea explorers are a special group of people. They are brave and bold, love exploration, have the belief to break through all difficulties and obstacles, and are willing to seek knowledge in uninhabited and desperate places. Pioneer of scientific advancement.

After winning the deep diving championship, the "Trieste" conducted many large-depth underwater surveys and made outstanding contributions to deep-sea exploration. In 1964, it was retired and displayed in the National Museum of the United States. The names and achievements of the Bikarts were admired by all mankind.

Since then, the deep-sea exploration has not ended, but has been revealed by the deep-sea submersibles that have come out one after another - the deep-sea stars. On May 9, 1962, the French "Archimedes" successfully completed the exploration of another trench in the Pacific Ocean, the Kamchatka Trench, and created a miracle in the history of deep-sea exploration that lasted three hours on the seabed. Then, in 1973, the French "Archimedes" and "Sienna" and the American "Alvin", these three deep-sea stars, experienced deep valley adventures at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, which not only confirmed Wegener's The theory of continental drift also proves that humans have the ability to explore the deep sea and deepen their understanding of the underwater world.

Today, we can proudly say that small underwater cities have turned from ideals into reality. So far, the longest underwater habitation module has stayed on the seabed is 7 months. At that time, more than 50 scientists and divers participated in the experiment in stages, and 5 women became the first batch of female seabed residents at a depth of about 300 meters. In order to allow underwater residents to roam freely in the sea, scientists are working hard to develop artificial gills so that one day, people can breathe oxygen in the water like fish, eliminating the existing gas cylinders and complicated breathing gases used by divers. By then, humans will become the masters of the ocean world.

A battle to the ocean has begun!