5C Max Shackelford The Importance of The CA Deep Sea Trench

Dover Sole is widely distributed from northern Baja California to the Bering Sea and is available year round. It inhabits mud or sandy bottoms and is caught from 5 to 750 fathoms. In the Washington, Oregon, and California area this fish is the most abundant of the flatfishes. It is very important commercially. It is marketed as fillets and sold as Dover sole fillets or sometimes fillet of sole. It has good flavor and good keeping qualities.

It may be the last place you’d expect to find corals—up to 6,000 m (20,000 ft) below the ocean’s surface, where the water is icy cold and the light dim or absent. Yet believe it or not, lush coral gardens thrive here. In fact, scientists have discovered nearly as many species of deep-sea corals (also known as cold-water corals) as shallow-water species. Like shallow-water corals, deep-sea corals may exist as individual coral polyps, as diversely-shaped colonies containing many polyps of the same species, and as reefs with many colonies made up of one or more species. Unlike shallow-water corals, however, deep-sea corals don’t need sunlight. They obtain the energy and nutrients they need to survive by trapping tiny organisms in passing currents. Within the last 20 years scientists, aided by technological advances, have uncovered one surprise after another about deep-sea corals.

The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached this goal in a U.S. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste. After a five-hour descent, the pair spent only a scant 20 minutes at the bottom and were unable to take any photographs due to clouds of silt stirred up by their passage.

In the ocean’s deepest abyss, scientists found single-celled organisms the size of a salad plate, crustaceans containing a chemical that could treat Alzheimer’s disease, and hints about the origins of life.

Incorporating new technologies, designs, and materials, the submersible DEEPSEA CHALLENGER is the product of years of dreaming, planning, building, and testing. From its one-of-a-kind vertical attitude to its innovative materials, including a highly sophisticated syntactic foam developed specifically to withstand the pressure at the bottom of the ocean, the craft is a showcase of engineering innovation. Above all, it is designed for safety—every critical function has multiple backup systems, from human life support to power, communications, and the mechanisms that return the sub to the surface of the ocean.

Oceanographer Jacques Piccard (1922-2008) worked with his father Auguste to design the Trieste. Auguste Piccard, a scientist from Switzerland, had experimented with buoyancy methods for his balloon flights - in fact, he broke the record for the highest altitude balloon flight in 1931-1932. He applied this knowledge about buoyancy to design the Trieste. So, interestingly, the Piccard family holds the record for both the highest altitude balloon flight and the deepest ocean dive.