60 years ago today the Trieste made the historic trip to be the first manned vehicle to go to the deepest part of the ocean and come back up again. Join the team as we chat with Don Walsh who made the incredible journey.
60 years ago today the Trieste made the historic trip to be the first manned vehicle to go to the deepest part of the ocean and come back up again. Join the team as we chat with Don Walsh who made the incredible journey.
Over 35,000 feet below the surface of the ocean the historic voyage came with its challenges, turmoil, and gasoline filled metal balloons. Come learn about the science behind the dive and some of the terrifying stories of their descent into the deep!
Music from https://filmmusic.io
"Expeditionary" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)
"The Descent" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
[To be released Jan 23rd]
Andrew: TODAY, January 23rd, marks the 60th anniversary of the very first dive to the deepest part of the ocean and our special guest today is one of the two men who made that incredible historic journey.
Frances: Join us for a very special episode of…
Both: Ocean Science Radio!
[Music]
Andrew: Hi everyone, I am Andrew Kornblatt a sci-com professional specializing in the ocean, clean-tech, and sustainable sectors. Unfortunately our regular Co-Host, Vicky Vásquez could not make it for this episode. Today we have a very special co-host, let me introduce to you, one of the co-stars of the live-play ocean science dungeons and dragons podcast, an Aquanaut and PhD candidate at FIU, Miss Naomi Frances Farabaugh. Tell us a bit about yourself
Frances: [About yourself]. Today we are talking about the deepest place in the ocean, the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench. It is located north of Australia, to the north west of the mariana Islands.
Andrew: It is 35,798 feet deep, or roughly 120 football fields or about 33 salesforce towers.
Frances: In other words, it is more than a mile deeper than Mount Everest (29,029) is high.
Andrew: It is 30 times deeper than light can penetrate and the pressure at the bottom is 1,071 times that at sea level. All in all, humans are not really evolved to survive there, let alone the journey to get there.
Frances: To date there have only ever been six successful manned dives to the challenger deep. Most recently, multimillionaire Victor Vescovo spent over $48 Million of his own money through his nonprofit Five Deeps Expedition.
Andrew: Today we are celebrating the 60 year anniversary of humans first reaching the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. Welcome, Don!
Don Walsh: My name is Don Walsh I'm a retired naval officer over my naval career, and after my Navy retirement, I've been involved in submarines deep ocean exploration other oceanographic research. I've been involved in exploration in the polar regions. I was a dean and professor at the University of Southern California.
Andrew: Don is also usually sailing around the world on expeditions, getting invited to awesome events, and working with groups like elders of the ocean and the explorer’s club.
Don Walsh: So I managed to keep busy. I'm never bored.
Frances: Sounds legit. So, Don, tell us a bit about yourself.
Don Walsh: I grew up on San Francisco Bay, so the ocean, the sea has been in my blood since I was a wee lad. I went into the naval academy when I was 18 years old. I majored in boats so great nature of my academic training was was related to the oceans not as a scientist but as a as a Mariner.
Andrew: When Don Walsh says he “went to the naval academy” he is talking about the famous Annapolis Naval Academy. For those at home who are unfamiliar, it is insanely competitive and prestigious; one of the requirements for even being considered for admission is nomination, usually from a Member of Congress.
Frances: Jimmy Carter, John McCain, Admiral Nimitz, Alan Shepard, and even James Irwin were graduates. But, then again so were Robert Heinlien, and Montel Williams.
Andrew: Don’t forget about Roger Staubach! So here is this young Naval graduate a few years out of Annapolis and 1960 rolls around.
Don Walsh: At the time I was a lieutenant in the Navy. I had just qualified in submarines so I spent two years sailing in submarines so I was somewhat familiar with the underwater work. And of course my degree from the Naval Academy Annapolis is engineering science no engineering related curricculum. So I was sort of an engineer and a submarine type when I went into the Triest program was my first command in the Navy that was in January of 1959 when I joined that project and I became the officer in charge of the Navy's bathyscaphe trieste.
Frances: You may have heard of a bathysphere, which is basically a giant metal ball with a window that gets dropped via a metal cable into the ocean to explore directly under wherever it was dropped. A bathyscaphe builds on that idea by attaching that ball to a giant float that is filled with a buoyant, incompressible fluid, such as gasoline.
Andrew: That’s right, the boom boom juice gasoline.
Frances: Once the steel cable was untethered, the craft sinks slightly faster than 1 mile per hour. The Trieste was a named after the city in Italy where it was actually put together. Back to Don.
Don Walsh: It worked on an interesting principle it was say if you are underwater free balloons. In other words it had the two components of a balloon that people ride in a hot air balloon and things like that that the balloon itself which has full of buoyant substance and hanging beneath that is the payload in other words the place where the people are in case of high altitude balloons it's a spherical capsule if you will and the people are inside. In the case of ones that most people ride in he just got a big bag basket hanging under a hot air balloon. But the underwater balloon is really the same principle the air is a steel read very thin shell steel hull a bit like a sausage and and and and escape and it is filled with the lighter than the water substance aviation gasoline because oil floats on water and you can't use a gas like helium or hydrogen or water because with your own hands you can take an inflated balloon class. So that's that's a no no no. Going deep in the ocean not going to go very far with it. So with a a gas gaseous substance instead you have to have a liquid a solid liquid that's later in the water petroleum oil floats on water. So that gave us our balloon component the the the lift and then suspended beneath it was a circle cabin which would hold the two man crew.
Frances: Don mentions the whole Balloon aspect here which makes sense when you take into account the man who designed the Bathescaphe was also known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights.
Don Walsh: ...Designed by Professor August Picard who is actually a Swiss physicist. Classically trained physicist but he used that balloon principle in the early thirties with a stratospheric balloon to go high up above the earth and study cosmic radiation. But he got to thinking about that principle of a balloon and then he said you know and do the same thing underwater. You just need the two major component parts and the flying of the underwater balloon as much similar to one that goes up into the stratosphere. So he he acted on his his idea. He started designing it in the mid 1930s but was unable to complete it due to World War II. And in 1948 he tested his first prototype bathyscaphe and made a tilt. While the book helped the French navy construct one.
Andrew: For those sci-fi fans out there who especially love Next Generation, two bits of trivia. The Trieste was the name of a ship that was supposed to rescue captain Jean-Luc Piccard’s Enterprise-D AND there is a theory that Gene Roddenberry named Jean-Luc Piccard as an amalgamation of chemist Jean Piccard and his twin brother Auguste Piccard, creator of the Trieste Bathyscaphe.
Frances: Nerd. So how exactly did Don get put into this metal ball attached to a gasoline filled metal balloon at the bottom of the ocean?
Don Walsh: A call went out for volunteers. And I met the Navy's stringent high standards for bathyscaphe pilot which they had no idea what that was because I was the only volunteer.
Andrew: Sounds like you were the best man for the job! What WAS that job… specifically?
Don Walsh: Our initial operations out of the Navy Laboratory in San Diego were to test and evaluate this platform for oceanographers and know weren't just going to jump in the ocean the scientists inside say let's have a look around. We want to thoroughly test the vehicle in the most extreme circumstances to learn where it's weaknesses where, where it strengths were for how good it was actually as a platform and to do all of that before we handed it over to the marine scientists. So my role really in the early days was like a test pilot new airplane.
Andrew: Oh, so a VOLUNTEER test pilot going to the BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN!
Frances: But think of the scientific research! And what about the thrill of setting the record of being the first living humans at the bottom of the ocean?
Don Walsh: It wasn't to set records. We really didn't do any research because two engineers not two scientists but all this is necessary to prove that the system made sure it was safe, make sure it was reliable. So that was the goal of that program. called Project Nekton.
Andrew: So, this 26-year-old Navy lieutenant, whose experience to date was commanding a submarine for two years that had never gone beneath 300 feet, was asked to take part in this secret project in the summer of 1958.
Frances: While the Piccards said it could venture to any depth on the planet, it had never been tested in deep water. So Don wiggled his way into the metal sphere with the designer’s son, Jacques.
Don Walsh: You know it was kinda crowded as a barrier by time loading and all of the equipment necessary to operate the vehicle and have an allowance for course the equipment that the researchers would bring along with you know racks inside there. There's I don't know maybe 40 or 50 cubic feet of space for two people. The Jacques Piccard was six feet two. So he kind of coiled up like a snake in there. I'm not particularly big so I could I could sit inside. But the thing is that it's such an unusual experience that you don't really feel the the the cramped conditions, its a little cold inside, you know maybe the mid 50s something like that. But body heat. If you dress properly you're OK.
Andrew: Looking like something out of a sci-fi movie these two explorers launched themselves into the deep unknown with a literal small window into this alien habitat.
Don Walsh: We only had one little viewport that was about three inches in diameter that you could see out. And it was it was a truncated cone. It was a plastic cone. The outer surface was maybe 10 inches in diameter. But the inner surface, where it penetrated the hull was just a few inches so you could basically just get one eye up to it that's almost 60 years ago.
Andrew: Funny story that Don once told me at a conference – While they were diving the pressure was so intense that this 10-inch thick GIANT PLEXIGLASS cone port-hole started to push into the ball, like multiple inches deep. In fact, after passing about 27,000 feet (9,000 meters) one of the outer window panes cracked, shaking the entire vessel.
Frances: Terrifying! Well, was it terrifying? What was the actual experience like?
Don Walsh: So what was it like. Well, everything we did was for the first time. It wasn't like you could look it up in a book or talk to somebody who had done it before we are pioneering technologies and techniques and trying to get the maximum productivity out of a vehicle like this. It was quite difficult in the learning curve is very steep sometimes.
Frances: The descent took nearly five hours with the 2-man crew crawling down the thousands of feet of ocean till finally settling on the bottom, which the explorers describe as a diatomaceous ooze of fine white silt made of microscopic algae.
Andrew: The expedition only had enough time to spend 20 minutes at the bottom, where Don and Jacques ate chocolate bars for energy in the 45 degrees Fahrenheit cabin.
Frances: While at the bottom, our intrepid explorers observed jellyfish and shrimp-like creatures, and a couple of small white flatfish swimming away, showing some vertebrate life could withstand the extremes of the bottom of the ocean.
Andrew: One of the things that is crazy to me about this trip is about the communications time-delay. To speak with their originating - or Mother ship, the crew had to use a sonar-hydrophone system. With the distance and the physics at play, these messages traveled at a speed of nearly a mile per second, it took about seven seconds for a voice message to travel from the craft upward. I imagine those pauses could feel VERY long a the bottom of the ocean.
Frances: After their short stay at the literal bottom of the ocean, Don and Jacques made the 3 and a half hour trip back to the surface and into the history books.
Andrew: One bit of this story that always kinda bums me out, especially since Don is such an amazingly sweet and friendly guy, is that making it to the bottom of the ocean and back didn’t really grasp the national attention. Walsh, Piccard and the other dozen crew who worked on Nekton never got a ticker-tape parade. The country was fixated on the space program, reeling from the 1959 landing of a soviet object on the moon and the whole craziness of the space race.
Frances: In 1963, just 3 years after it’s initial dive, the Trieste was modified and used to find the wreck of the missing nuclear submarine the USS Thresher off the coast of New England. Over the years the Trieste was changed, retrofitted, and redesigned to the point where not a single original part remains. The Trieste now lives at the National Museum of the United States Navy in Washington DC.
Andrew: Walsh commanded a sub until 1970. Later, he ran his own maritime consulting company out of San Pedro, and founded USC’s Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies. He piloted submersibles on the wrecks of both the Bismarck and Titanic. But he will forever be remembered for this one thing, one of the first men to go down to the deepest part of the bottom of the ocean, and then come back up.
[Shoutout break]
Frances: Being one of the forefathers of deep water exploration, Don has some thoughts on his dive as it compares to the efforts we are seeing today.
Don Walsh: Technology today has overtaken all of this. And so modern submersibles have bigger windows and so on and so forth.
Don Walsh: The whole idea of bathoscaphe of course went away in the really by the mid 60s. We developed other ways of getting that buoyancy that we needed. Still have the spherical cabin but they used a plastic foam a very robust plastic foam that was filled with glass micro-spheres and each one of those microspheres contains a small bubble of air. When you add it all of these blocks of foam which could be passed shaped and so on. Gave you the buoyancy you needed so you didn't need the gasoline anymore. And it was logistically much easier to handle those later manned submersibles.
Andrew: Thank goodness! I know I am being a little ridiculous here but this entire time I have been imagining what it was like to dive with a giant balloon of explosive liquid.
Don Walsh: That gasoline is pretty dangerous and 54000 gallons of gasoline sitting in the middle of a Navy lab on the waterfront in a very thinshell container was always scary because that's a lot of bang there if something happened. And so being able substitute this we call syntactic foam for the gasoline. It's very safe that it doesn't burn and it certainly is not going to fail in a major way. That was a big thing.
Don Walsh: Another of material science advantage was the evolution of titanium technology which gave us a great deal of strength with decreased weight so we could get a make a pressure hull a sphere or a cabin for a manned submersible out of titanium and say a lot of weight over say one that's made out of steel that sort of thing. And that also miniaturization of electronics. What kind of electronics we had in 1959. Vacuum tubes and things like that and integrated circuits didn't exist. All of that and battery technology we used you know not much different than automobile batteries to power. They are heavy. You give out much power the reliable sturdy but it really did a job on your payload. And now as we move towards a solar zinc battery isn't nickel cadmium batteries and today the lithium batteries you're getting a lot of energy a high energy cross-section fuel per volume of battery. And they're very reliable. They're they're lightweight cost effective. So all of these things these convergent technologies came together to make things simpler and simpler.
Frances: With all of these advances in technology, from materials to vacuum tubes and electronics. There is huge opportunity to continue to explore the most remote and hazardous environments on earth…
Andrew: And beyond!
Frances: So with that advancement, what is Don’s opinion on having physical human exploration, and does it have a future in the ocean or is the future ROVs and underwater drones?
Don Walsh: The future of manned submersibles we’ll always have them but they'll be kind of a footnote to the main exploration the deep ocean the the the heavy duty heavy lifting is today is being done by unmanned submersibles, you know there's no one aboard. In one case a remotely operated vehicles are being tended by a mother ship which controls the vehicle through an umbilical chord. All those technologies I just mentioned allow you to put a lot of capability into a rather small system. In the early days, because of all the limitations technologies and things we didn’t have, it was cheaper and easier to put a human inside the vehicle to control it. Most of us have pretty good computer we have between our shoulders top of our neck and humans inside could do a lot of the jobs that are now automated so we don't need the people as much as we did before because we could get the same quality of data and much more efficiently and much lower costs but there's still be room for a manned submersibles, a few. And and they'll still be out there but they will not be the primary driving force for exploring the deep ocean that will be the unmanned submersibles.
Andrew: One issue of contention that I have found permeates the ocean exploration community is a bit of, not necessarily resentment, but tension over the split between the amount the world is investing in ocean and terrestrial exploration compared to the economic weight we throw behind exploring space. When I asked Don about this he gave me a very unique and interesting response.
Don Walsh: We really only explored about 10 percent of the world ocean and today we're talking about colonizing the moon going to Mars and all that and nothing against the space program. It's exciting. We have it in the ocean community have gotten an awful lot of our technology out of NASA and in fact NASA has made massive investments in ocean sciences because a lot of the you know planetary satellites of planets have oceans on them. And so NASA is looking at ways of especially the robotics of how they can land a spacecraft on one of these satellites and be able to explore that ocean.
Don Walsh: So we're getting a lot of support from the space program and that's the kind of broad research projects but also just from the technology side because they have these massive budgets and those very expensive place to work. We can tap into that technology transfer we've got a lot of benefit out of the space program. I would just ask for parity in exploring the manned satellite that we all live on Home Planet Earth.
Frances: Wise words from an adventurous spirit. Here is hoping that for 2020 we find that the money going to exploring the ocean gets a DRAMATIC increase.
Andrew: And that partnerships between NASA and Ocean groups like NOAA can give us the “yes, and” approach to the space vs ocean exploration question. Let’s focus on getting stuff DONE in 2020, more exploration, more conservation, more science!
Frances: Big thanks to Don Walsh for joining us today and big thanks to YOU our listeners. Please be sure to subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast; this helps us raise our discoverability and reach far more people.
Andrew: Until next time, this has been the first episode of the new year for…
Together: Ocean Science Radio!
[Music Break]
=Banter=