On 21 December 1872, the British naval corvette
HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth, England on
an historic endeavor. Although the sophisticated
steam-assisted sailing vessel had been originally
constructed as a combat ship, her instruments of
war had been recently removed to make room for
laboratories, dredging equipment, and measuring
apparatuses. She and her crew of 243 sailors and
scientists set out on a long, meandering
circumnavigation of the globe with orders to
catalog the ocean's depth, temperature, salinity,
currents, and biology at hundreds of sitesan
oceanogrraphic effort far more ambitious than any undertaken before it.
For three and a half long, dreary years the crew
spent day after day dredging, measuring, and
probing the oceans. Although the data they
collected was scientifically indispensable, men
were driven to madness by the tedium, and some
sixty souls ultimately opted to jump ship rather
than take yet another depth measurement or
temperature reading. One day in 1875, however, as
the crew were "sounding" an area near the Mariana
Islands in the western Pacific, the sea swallowed
an astonishing 4,575 fathoms (about five miles)
of measuring line before the sounding weight
reached the floor of the ocean. The bedraggled
researchers had discovered an undersea valley
which would come to be known as the Challenger
Deep. Reaching 6.78 miles at its lowest point, it
is now known to be the deepest location on the
whole of the Earth. The region is of such immense
depth that if Mount Everest were to be set on the
sea floor at that location, the mighty mountain's
peak would still be under more than a mile of water.
<http://www.damninteresting.com/steely-eyed-hydronauts-of-the-mariana>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/steely-eyed-hydronauts-of-mariana.htm>monochrom
at 8/25/2009 01:43:00 PM
