![]() ![]() He rebooted the starboard Toughbook and then relaunched the software, also to no effect. ![]() He reset the software of both the port and starboard electrical “sides,” but there was no change. In the sub, Vescovo was trying to figure out what was wrong. The soft-spoken Blades, who was working through the failure and finding solutions in his head that made sense, finally replied, brushing Lahey off with an “It’s interesting…” “What the fuck, Tom?” Lahey said in a plaintively desperate tone. Silence at such a depth has a hard quiet. He also tried texting, but nothing came back. Sensing an issue, he tried to contact the surface repeatedly, but had no success. ![]() It was so loud on the starboard side headset (the pilot sits on the port side) that he could clearly hear it from across the interior of the capsule on the unused headset. When he finished the test, he had dramatically higher noise levels in his headset, around 10 times as much. To arrest his descent, he blasted the thrusters at full power for 20 seconds. Vescovo noticed that he was descending at a rapid rate and thought that might be the reason for the comms failure. He could not hear Lahey, who was in the control room conducting the quarter-hour checks. By the time he reached 3,200 meters, his communications with the Pressure Drop and the Learned Response on the surface suddenly failed. “I have a feeling all is not right,” he said to himself. After checking various electrical systems, he couldn’t figure out what it was. Blades was able to debug the problem in thirty minutes.Īfter passing through 3,000 meters (9,842 feet), he heard a low humming noise that sounded like a lawn mower in the distance coming from inside the sub. The Ethernet cables attaching them to the submarine’s data bus were not properly connected. On the pre-dive check, there was a fault in the Toughbooks, the panels (or graphic user interfaces, GUIs, as they were usually called) used for data readout. This posed a danger for the swimmer who had to “ride” the sub to attach the drogue and to detach and later reattach the tow line. ![]() An obvious hazard was the water temperature, which was below freezing (though salt water doesn’t actually freeze). Even as the winds continued to whip across the ship, all in all everyone felt it was diveable. The Triton team forged ahead, preparing for Vescovo’s solo dive. This was at the limits of what they deemed to be safe, but still doable. The sky notwithstanding, the conditions to launch any open water operation were predictably unkind, with swells dominating the area and a partnering wind kicking up the waters to sea state 3. 3, the sun’s rays pierced the threatening clouds, but the sea was ignoring the sun, kicking up a fuss. After diving to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, his second deep ocean dive took place in January 2019 in the Southern Ocean, known by mariners as the “shrieking sixties” because of its ferocious storms. Technological innovations, engineering breakthroughs and the derring-do of a unique team of engineers and scientists built the most advanced deep-diving submersible named the Limiting Factor, able to withstand the deep ocean’s pressure on the sub of 8 tons per square inch-the equivalent of having 292 fueled and fully loaded 747s stacked on top of it. E xpedition Deep Ocean tells the inside story of explorer Victor Vescovo’s quest to become the first person to reach the bottom of all five of the world’s oceans. ![]()
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