THE OCEAN'S DEEPEST TRENCHES, THE WORLD'S LAST FRONTIER
NOT CONTENT TO SCALE THE HEIGHTS OF SPACE this year with Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson is preparing for a full assault on the deepest reaches of the planet. His Virgin Galactic venture aims to commercialise space travel, and sister company Virgin Oceanic plans to take paying 'aquanauts' on deep sea 'flights' to uncharted depths of the oceans.
Nearly 500 adventurers have signed up for space travel and Branson believes there are thousands more rearing to discover the underwater wilderness. Neither adventure will be cheap. The first few Virgin Oceanic missions, which start this year, will be purely scientific and will be covered by the BBC and mapped on Google Earth. It's expected that any data collected will allow man to better understand everything from how the continents formed to how to protect the planet and its life forms far into the future. "From a scientific point of view, this is akin to discovering the Amazon for the first time. The amount that they're going to discover down there is incalculable," says Branson.
Sixty-year-old Branson and American sailor and explorer Chris Welsh plan on using a custom-designed, single-seater, winged mini sub originally commissioned for friend and fellow record-breaking adventurer, Steve Fossett, who died in 2007 while flying over the Sierra Nevada. Fossett had intended to complete the first solo dive to the deepest spot in the world, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. At 10,972 metres, it is deeper than Mount Everest is high. Now this will be Virgin Oceanic's first mission before exploring the world's other oceanic abysses: the Atlantic's 8,605-metre deep Puerto Rico Trench, the South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean, the Diamantina Trench in the Indian Ocean and the Molloy Deep in the Arctic Ocean.
The sub, named Necker Nymph after Branson's Necker Island, is already in use, currently available for USD2,500 a day for guests of his private Caribbean resort. Branson aims to eventually create a larger submarine for tourist transportation.
Necker Nymph will be launched from a 38-metre racing catamaran, and is the only sub able to operate to depths of up to 11,000 metres. Once it reaches the ocean floor, its unique hydroplanes (or 'wings' modelled on the fins of dolphins and whales) and thrusters allow it to 'fly' up to 10 kilometres along, collecting data and operating autonomously for up to 24 hours. Built from carbon fibre and titanium, with a quartz viewing dome, Necker Nymph weighs 3,636 kg and can withstand 1,500 times the pressure of an aeroplane — vital as a leak would mean certain death. As the depths are beyond the capabilities of any other craft, rescue would be impossible.
Scientific partners from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Southern California, the University of Hawaii and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute will study samples brought back, looking for novel organisms as well as potentially beneficial enzymes or genes.
No one has yet documented the entire vertical sequence of life in the world's oceans in one place. In the southern Mariana Trench, it will be possible to dive from the trench axis at over 10 km in depth and rise up the face of a nearby fault scarp to near-surface — documenting the changes in ecosystems along the way. This could provide the first such complete record of biological diversity from top to bottom in the world's oceans.
Well before reaching the bottom, the sub will encounter shooting stars of icy blue light, a silent fireworks display created by the bioluminescence of marine creatures. Dr Edith Widder, an expert from the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, wants to find out how bioluminescence can be used as a tool to determine the distribution of creatures in the ocean and monitor the health of marine ecosystems. It proves that reaching the Earth's last unexplored frontier is a mission not merely for a handful of adventurers and entrepreneurs, but for us all.
The only craft ever to have explored the depths of the Mariana Trench was the bathyscaphe Trieste, which briefly touched down with two co-pilots in 1960. Despite cracking one of the outer windows, the ground-breaking Challenger Deep mission was successful, though only accessing a vertical column of water. One of Virgin Oceanic's goals will be to locate the tons of iron shot ballast dropped by the Trieste to enable its ascent. Life moves very slowly in extremely cold temperatures underwater, so the results of a half century of iron exposure will be important scientific data. The Trieste remains on display at the US Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport.
