Big Interviews, Other, Travel - Saturday, June 5, 2010 21:06 - 0 Comments

Discovery Channel Magazine: Deepest Man

Discovery Channel Magazine, June 2010

It is January 23 1960, and Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard are on top of a wonky submersible called the Trieste, pitching on 12-foot Pacific Ocean waves having just made history. Over the previous nine hours they have piloted their craft, called a bathyscaph, more than seven miles to the floor of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench – the deepest place in the world’s oceans. And now, waiting to be picked up by their support ships, they are already wondering who will follow them. “We thought that in a year or so there’d be more people out here with better machines, to explore these deep trenches,” Walsh says. “We certainly hoped so.”

Not so. Fifty years on, nobody has ever gone back; and since the death of scientist Jacques Piccard in 2006, Walsh – recalling the tale to Discovery Channel Magazine at his ranch in Dora, Oregon – is now the only man alive to have gone so deep. You might think of him as the Hillary of the ocean, except it’s even more pioneering than that: where hundreds have followed Hillary and Tenzing to the top of the world, none have ever followed Walsh and Piccard to the bottom.

This is the version filed. To see the article is it ran in Discovery, click here Trieste (3)

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