![]() The underwater explorers only spent 20 minutes at the bottom of the world. They found flatfish at the bottom, took a self-portrait, and initiated a return to the surface. They spent five hours descending and reached a depth of 35,797 feet (10,911 meters). Walsh and Piccard decided to proceed with the dive. If the inner window had cracked, we would've been instantly dead," added Don Walsh. "We heard a big bang, but we didn't know what it was. While the duo was making the descent, one of the submarine's outer windows cracked. "The Navy just didn't want to be embarrassed by a failed science spectacular." We were trying to do the project sort of out of sight because we weren't too sure it was going to work," Walsh once said. "Guam, in those days, was a backwater and just right for us. The deep-diving submersible was piloted by Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh. On January 23, 1960, Trieste, an Italian research bathyscaphe, became the first manned watercraft to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep. ![]() It drops off again into the five-mile deep hole - the Mariana Trench, a natural trench that runs twice the length of California and is 30 times deeper than the Empire State Building is high. The Western Pacific, however, is different. It also provided the first map of the ocean floor, showing how it gently slopes away from the land and then plummets thousands of feet into vast, flat plains. Over the years, the measurement was fine-tuned and later consolidated, but the HMS Challenger expedition marked the birth of modern oceanography. On March 23, 1875, the scientists recorded a sounding of 4,475 fathoms (26,850 feet or 8,184 meters) in the region. The Challenger Deep was named after the HMS Challenger, the vessel of the British Royal Navy that led The Challenger expedition (1872-1876), the world's first global marine research journey. Nevertheless, researchers and oceanographers believe that the Challenger Deep is not the deepest point of the world's oceans. The pressure at the lowest known point on the planet is between 15,000 and 16,000 pounds per square inch (PSI), i.e., a thousand times stronger than at a surface or the equivalent of being crushed by the weight of 50 Jumbo jets.
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