This section contains 499 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
Trieste.
On 23 January 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste, a manned vehicle designed to dive into deep seas, dove to about 37,000 feet in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean. Inside were twenty-eight-year-old navy lieutenant Don Walsh and thirty-seven-year-old Frenchman Jacques Piccard. Piccard's father designed and built the Trieste in Italy for the U.S. Navy. The dive took four hours and forty-eight minutes; the Trieste spent half an hour at the bottom, where the hull withstood pressures of over 17,000 pounds per square inch.
Rough Descent.
Trieste dove 4 feet per second to 27,000 feet. The first part of the dive was smooth compared to the rough seas above. Then Trieste hit a thermo-cline, where water temperatures drop sharply at a certain depth, causing the relative weight of the craft to increase. There were thermoclines at 250 feet and again about 400 feet. The second was thick and caused the craft...
This section contains 499 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |