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Seven Miles Under the Sea: The Story of Don Walsh and One of America's Greatest Marine Adventures
Seven Miles Under the Sea
The seldom-told story of Don Walsh and One of America's Greatest Marine Adventures
written by Kevin Max
In the 1950s, following decades of war and global instability, people around the world were allowed to dream again. It was the WWII Antebellum, and ages of industrialization and of exploration created an era of pent-up discovery. Humanity was redefining what was possible.
In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest. In July 1969, Apollo 11 would place Buzz Aldrin and crew on the moon. Perhaps the lesserknown daring feats of exploration came on January 23, 1960. U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh, who lives in Coquille near the Oregon Coast, and Swiss engineer and oceanographer Jacques Piccard closed the hatch on a steel structure they believed would hold against the crushing pressure of the deep ocean and deliver them 7 miles down to the floor of the deepest point of the ocean, in what would be the deepest dive in history.
U.S. Navy Lt. Larry Shumaker, left, stands with Lt. Don Walsh, Dr. Andreas Rechnitzer and Jacques Piccard on the Trieste.
NH1044872 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command
The bathyscaphe (pronounced bath-ehskaf) was a pill-shaped submarine little more than 50 feet long and with a small steel sphere attached to the bottom. It came to the attention of the Navy in an unusual way, through a scientist and explorer and its creator in Switzerland. Jacques Piccard’s father, Auguste Piccard, was a physics professor, a tireless innovator, a balloonist and the inspiration behind absent-minded half-deaf Professor Cuthbert Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin. “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry reportedly named “Star Trek” captain Jean-Luc Picard as a nod to twin Piccard brothers, Auguste and Jean. Jacques Piccard’s son, Bertrand, in 2015, piloted the highly publicized first around-theworld flight in a solar-powered airplane. In fact, the Piccard family, through generations, was the epitome of the explorer scientist–all aeronauts, hydronauts or balloonists.
In 1931, the elder Piccard became the first person to enter the stratosphere, where he collected data on cosmic solar rays that he would eventually contribute to the work of Albert Einstein. Auguste Piccard’s fascination with space led him to build a steel pressurized sphere that would allow him to rise into the stratosphere under a helium balloon. Soon, he realized his high-altitude sphere could be adapted for deep-sea exploration, too. In 1937, Auguste Piccard completed what he called a bathyscaphe, Greek for “deep ship”. It was shelved until after the war, and the U.S. Navy then took an interest.
America wanted her own deep-sea vehicle and had American dollars to pay for it. The government sent an emissary to Switzerland to talk to the Piccard family and soon moved the Piccard family and the bathyscaphe, called Trieste, to San Diego to work on Project Nekton, the codename for the submersible mission that would lead to the Mariana Trench.
At age 28, Walsh was at his desk aboard submarine Flotilla One when an unfamiliar face appeared. Dr. Andreas Rechnitzer, who grew up in Southern California, had graduated from the midshipmen’s school and earned a doctorate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Navy had a dangerous project and it needed just two submarine pilots to volunteer.
Behind him stood a tall, thin man in civilian clothing. Jacques Piccard, a 37-year-old Swiss engineer with the explorer’s gene, would be the second and final member of the crew.
“When [Piccard] did speak about the Bathyscaphe Trieste, it was with some degree of passion, but short on the florid or humor,” Walsh recalled in a recent interview.
The mission would seem absurd to most onlookers—can two men in a small, submersible space go have a look around the deepest depths of the sea?
“There was this collection of odd bits of metal,'' Walsh recalled. “To me, it looked like an explosion in a boiler factory. I thought to myself that I would never get into that thing …”
South of Japan and north of Australia in the Philippine Sea lie the Mariana Islands, about 130 miles north of Guam. Skirting the Mariana Islands to the south and to the east is an arc-shaped scar in the ocean floor that is 1,580 miles long (the same distance as San Diego to Vancouver, BC) and an average of 43 miles across. Known as the Challenger Deep, at one point it is 35,797 feet deep–the deepest trench in the world.
Walsh’s team consisted of fourteen members, whose expertise ranged from material science to mechanics to oceanography to Navy submariners–a maritime Ocean’s 11. All participants were aware it would take a tank to withstand the water pressure of the deep ocean and bring its human cargo back alive.
The body of the bathyscaphe was made with steel 5 inches thick to hold out against the intense pressure of the deep sea. The deeper a vessel dives into water, the stronger the pressure to collapse it. At sea level, for example, water pushes on a body at a pressure of 14.5 pounds per square inch. The liquid in our bodies matches that pressure to be in equilibrium. For every 33 feet deeper in water, the pressure increases by another 14.5 pounds per square inch. At 15,797 feet below sea level–Challenger Deep—the pressure on a surface is 15,729 pounds per square inch, or the equivalent of three Dodge Ram pickup trucks stacked on every square inch of the vessel.
Unlike today’s submarines, where its length includes living space, all but a small sphere of Trieste was dedicated to the functional processes of the vessel. That space was a 7-foot-diameter pressure cabin. For measure, a standard bathroom is 8 feet by 5 feet. Imagine being sealed in a bathroom-sized space for nine hours with a colleague and the real likelihood of not coming out alive.
Piccard and Walsh in the cramped space of the Trieste
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The body, or pressure hull, was filled with 34,000 gallons of gasoline, a liquid lighter than water, to give the vessel buoyancy in open water and allow it to rise from the depths. Heavy iron pellets were counterpoint to the lightweight gas, and stored in two compartments on either side of the vessel. Changing equilibrium of the gas and iron pellet ballast caused the ship to rise or sink. Once at the bottom of the dive, the iron pellets would have to be slowly released to make the vessel lighter to rise slowly and eventually resurface.
“Trieste was only a potential bomb if there were fumes and a source of ignition,” Walsh said. “Of course, [the fuel] burned readily. We took extreme measures while loading and unloading it.”
Back in San Diego and over the span of a few months, the Trieste crew gained confidence in its impending mission. A number of test dives off the California coast in the books, they brought Trieste to Challenger Deep in the western Pacific.
God loves the pragmatic ingenuity of our predecessors. Because nautical maps were not truly accurate during this era and before sonic pulses were finely tuned, the crew took days of trolling waters and throwing dynamite overboard to divine their own conceptual map of the trench. They counted seconds by stopwatch to count the rebound echo of the explosion to the ship’s underwater monitors. The longer the delay, the deeper the ocean floor. In November 1959, they dove to 18,000 feet and set a new record. Two months later, Triestee went 24,000 feet and a new record.
A fueling operation, with Shumaker on deck, in November 1959.
NH1044831 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command
The vessel passed her material stress tests, and the crew was ready. Walsh and Piccard were poised to undertake one of the most daring expeditions in modern times.
“We had worked 24/7 for several months at Guam doing progressively deeper test dives,” Walsh said. “We were either going to succeed or fail, but we had done all we could to ensure success.”
On the day of the dive, Walsh and Piccard boarded the Trieste in a heaving sea. One team member recalled seeing sharks in the water as the men stepped from the rubber raft onto the bobbing, exposed surface of the bathyscaphe. Piccard was having second thoughts and considered postponing the dive. But Walsh, the submarine commander, was unfazed by the choppy water and persuaded Piccard not to abandon the mission.
Just before the record dive.
NH96797 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command
Just before the Trieste embarked on its historic mission, Rechnitzer, the project manager aboard the adjacent mother ship bobbing next to Trieste, received a radio message from higher-ups in the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, saying, “Project canceled. Come home,” Walsh said in a 2014 interview with the Office of Naval Research. Rechnitzer put the message in his pocket and asked his colleague, Chief John Michel, to have a cup of coffee with him down below. By the time the two returned to the deck, the Trieste was well underway. Rechnitzer sent back the message: “Unable to comply. Trieste passing 10,000 feet.”
Inside the cabin, Walsh recalled in a Rolex documentary, it was about 40 degrees, “almost like a household refrigerator, and not much bigger than a household refrigerator.” Because of the oceanic pressure, the vessel had just one small observation window, and it was small. Below 1,000 meters, Trieste had entered the Midnight Zone, a depth at which no light pervades, only darkness. Through the blackness, Walsh recalled seeing the bizarre glowing lights of bioluminescent fish wafting slowly by, like stars in a midnight sky.
The cramped quarters of the Trieste.
NH1073330 courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command
At 31,000 feet, Walsh and Piccard jumped. A bang rang through the cabin like an explosion. The two men sat in apprehension below a fuselage of 34,000 gallons of gasoline, wondering if this was it. “We didn’t know what it was, but we were still alive.” Later, they found a plexiglass window in a sealed-off entry chamber had cracked and broken under the pressure.
The Trieste seemed to function without complications, and continued its descent into the deepest reaches of the Mariana Trench. After five-and-a-half hours, Walsh and Piccard found what they were looking for–the absolute floor of the deepest spot of the ocean.
Outside the small observation window, Piccard and Walsh saw something unexpected—a halibut-looking flat fish scurrying along the floor. Aquatic life at nearly 16,000 pounds of pressure per square inch! The two men shook hands on reaching a new submarine record. A cloud of light sediment rose up from the floor when the Trieste touched down and obscured further observation.
To begin their ascent, the Trieste needed to discharge iron pellets and weight. The magnetic apertures had to open under extreme pressure. Walsh released iron ballast and the Trieste slowly rose from the floor. Three hours and fifteen minutes later, two unknown men, who had sealed themselves into a tiny steel sphere in the name of exploration, emerged as heroes to cameras and reporters from Time magazine.
“Not many of us get to set global ‘firsts’, and there’s some pride in being a member of a great team that actually did a durable first,” Walsh said.
That same year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited the Trieste crew to the White House and awarded them Legion of Merit medals, for outstanding and meritorious service in the armed forces.
Walsh would go on to earn a doctorate in oceanography, serve under presidents Carter and Reagan on the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere and be named as one of the world’s greatest explorers by Time magazine. He is an honorary faculty at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Since his historic dive in 1960, Walsh has been invited on the next two expeditions to Challenger Deep— the first with film director James Cameron in March 2012 and again with financier and explorer Victor Vescovo, in 2019.
Jacques Piccard would continue to explore, joining a submarine mission to study the Gulf Stream and founding the Foundation for the Study and Protection of Seas and Lakes in Switzerland. He died in 2008 at age 86.
