Product Code Database
A bathyscaphe () is a free-diving, self-propelled deep sea submersible, consisting of a crew cabin similar to a Bathysphere, but suspended below a float rather than from a surface cable, as in the classic Bathysphere design.
The float is filled with gasoline because it is readily available, buoyant, and, for all practical purposes, incompressible. The incompressibility of the gasoline means the tanks can be very lightly constructed, since the pressure inside and outside the tanks equalizes, eliminating any differential. By contrast, the crew cabin must withstand a huge pressure differential and is massively built. Buoyancy at the surface can be trimmed easily by replacing gasoline in the tanks with water, because water has a greater density.
Auguste Piccard, inventor of the first bathyscaphe, coined the name bathyscaphe using the Ancient Greek words (), meaning 'deep', and (), meaning 'vessel, ship'.
Piccard's second bathyscaphe was actually a third vessel Trieste, which was purchased by the United States Navy from Italy in 1957. It had two water ballast tanks and eleven buoyancy tanks holding of gasoline.
The onboard systems indicated a depth of 37,800 ft (11,521 m) but this was later corrected to 35,813 ft (10,916 m) by taking into account variations arising from salinity and temperature. Later and more accurate measurements made in 1995 have found the Challenger Deep to be slightly shallower at 35,798 ft (10,911 m).
The crew of the Trieste, which was equipped with a powerful light, noted that the seafloor consisted of ooze and reported observing "some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across" (30 by 15 cm) lying on the seabed. "To the bottom of the sea" , T. A. Heppenheimer, AmericanHeritage.com This put to rest the question of whether or not there was life at such a depth in the complete absence of light.
Accomplishments
In 1960 Trieste, carrying Piccard's son Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, reached the deepest known point on the Earth's surface, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
See also
External links
|
|
