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Twenty minutes at the bottom
The dive
Their submarine, the Trieste, carried them down through the ocean for five hours. At the bottom, a window cracked, and they began to resurface.
The trench
The trench they reached is the Challenger Deep, about 300 kilometers southwest of Guam, with a floor at 10,994 meters. James Cameron came close in 2012 during the Deepsea Challenger mission, reaching 10,898 meters.
At 10,972 meters, the depth is the same as the average cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. Picture looking out a plane window at the ground far below: that distance, pointed straight down into the dark.
The pressure
The water pressure in the hadal zone, which starts at 6,000 meters and is named after Hades, is 1,100 times what it is at the surface. That is roughly an elephant balancing on a postage stamp. Without protection, a person would be crushed immediately.
Why does pressure get so extreme down there?
Water pressure rises steadily with depth because of the weight of the water stacked above. At the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the pressure is more than 1,000 times the pressure at the surface. Submersibles built for it need thick, spherical hulls, because a sphere spreads the load evenly in every direction. The Trieste had a steel crew sphere with walls roughly 12 centimeters thick.
How did the Trieste sink and rise?
The Trieste worked like a balloon in reverse. It had a large float filled with gasoline, which is lighter than water and barely compresses under pressure, giving it lift. For the descent it carried tons of iron shot as ballast, held by electromagnets. Releasing the shot made the vessel light enough to climb back toward the surface.
How did Cameron's dive differ from the Trieste?
James Cameron made his 2012 dive alone, in a vessel shaped like a vertical torpedo that descended upright and spinning slowly. The Trieste carried two men and dropped in a much bulkier shape. The Deepsea Challenger was built with a foam material made of tiny glass spheres in resin, which gave it buoyancy without a giant gasoline float. The trip down took about two hours, far less than the Trieste's five.
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