Deepsea Challenge 3D Page #5

how to fly this thing

over the bottom.

I have good control

of the vehicle

and I seem to be

in a stable hover.

Coming back around south.

Oh, great.

Big holothurian.

Wow, hes gorgeous.

Nice.

Whoa! Hes attacking me!

Boosh.

Oh, hes not digging that.

Sorry about

the thruster, buddy.

That is a big sea cucumber.

He has no idea

how beautiful he is.

What the heck are you?

Oh yeah, polychaete.

Basically I get so carried away shooting the critters

that I forget

Ive got work to do.

I need to get good

with the manipulator arm.

Were not just

out here doing test dives.

Were doing science, too,

as were going along.

So I've got to get

some rock samples.

Otherwise the science team arent going to be happy campers.

Gotcha.

All right.

My first sample.

I'm proud of it.

I am at the lander. Over.

And we also built a lander.

its this unmanned

science vehicle

that basically

just free falls to the bottom.

its got lights

and high resolution cameras

and it can take

water samples and so on.

its even got

this arm that drops down

with a baited trap

so it can attract

all the bottom foragers

from miles around.

Lander is released.

On ascent. Over.

I think of human knowledge

as being our headlights

and the yre shining out

into the darkness,

and right beyond those lights

is something else.

And all we have to do is move forward a little bit more

and that truth

will be revealed,

or that new disco very

will be revealed.

Deepsea Challenger,

confirm request to ascend.

COPY-

Weights are coming off.

There you go.

Vehicle is very stable

at 5.6 knots.

[cheering]

Deepsea Challenger,

surface contact.

Copy you, S.O.

Were here.

(Dave) All right. its always good to see you back.

We ll get you-- we II come and get you underway and get you onboard.

( James )

Copy that.

(Da ve)

Okay. Steady!

Goldy, take the line in!

(James)

3, 300 feet.

Thats like one-tenth

of where were going.

But you know what? Right now, its the victory this team really needed.

The curse of fear

has officially been lifted.

Were going to dive the New Britain trench again, but...

I want to see this town of Rabaul thats only a few miles away.

Or see whats left of it.

In 1994, this town

of 17,000 people

was utterly destroyed

by a volcanic eruption.

An eruption caused by the same forces that formed the trench itself.

This is where

my house used to be,

and a couple of houses here are all-- This is all like a neighborhood?

Were there a lot of houses here? Yeah. Quite a lot of houses here.

What it did was just like, kind of like black smoke kind of thing.

And when it did that,

it was all black.

We couldnt see. I had to touch you to know that you're there.

(James)Amazing. (Francis) Yeah.

We were diving just on the south side of New Britain Island,

and we go out

about 30 miles offshore,

and we can go down five miles in the trench, in the New Britain Trench.

See, these deep trenches are formed when one plate of the Earths crust

is dragged underneath another plate, right? Yeah.

They call it subduction and its because the continents

are all moving around

like these big rafts.

The rock of the sea floor is grinding down underneath, right,

under these billions of tons of rock overhead, and it melts.

And the pressure

just builds and builds

until all this magma

is pushed up ward and boom!

So we came here and we saw,

wow, look at what these forces

that are happening way down so many miles down in the Earth,

look what theyre doing here and look at the consequence to human beings.

We belong here, so best thing to do is just to play

and get on with life,

I suppose.

The same subduction forces that caused the Rabaul eruptions

also unleash

undersea earthquakes.

When that fault slips

in one of these deep trenches,

it displaces

an enormous pulse of water.

its a release of energy more than 3,000 times the Hiroshima bomb,

creating a tsunami.

[reporter speaking Japanese]

We could save a lot of lives if we could predict these events,

but we need to know a lot more about whats happening

down in these deep trenches.

So we need the machines

that can go down there.

Surface, Deepsea Challenger.

I am on the bottom.

Depth is 12, 164 feet. Over.

I'm two-and-a-haIf miles down,

same depth as Titanic,

which I've been to

plenty of times,

but always in subs that were built by big government programs.

No privately built sub

has ever gone this deep.

And then I've got

to remind myself,

this is only a third of the way to where I'm going.

Oh, got us a critter.

We got us a real critter here.

Yesiree, Bob.

Time to zoom in on this one.

It looks like an octopus.

Yeah, love those deep octopus.

Wonder what the hell

hes thinking.

[snapping]

Uh oh, thats not good.

Thats not good.

Loud snapping sounds not good.

(James) Well, Don Walsh always says, if you hear a loud bang

and youve got time to think about it, you're going to be okay.

Something just imploded.

Hes chasing me.

[laughs]

You're a mighty warrior,

arent you?

Each one

of these chance encounters

is a gift from the ocean,

and I'm grateful.

This is my church,

down here, alone.

I feel the power

of natures imagination,

which is so much

greater than our own.

Here we are with

our high tech equipment,

diving in one of the wildest places on the planet.

The rainforests

of Papua New Guinea

were the inspiration

for the landscapes in Avatar,

so theres no way I'm not going to go ashore and explore.

[singing]

Weve been invited

by the Baining people

to witness

their sacred fire dance.

The ceremony suggests to me the spirits of this land, shaped by fire...

by the powerful and dangerous forces deep in the Earth.

But the spirit world doesnt

cause the Earth to erupt..

or cause the sea

to rise up in a tsunami.

The only true path to understanding nature is science.

Thats why were out here.

Thats why were diving.

[man]

In clear feet, clear four.

Todays dive is 27,000 feet,

over five miles down.

So this is the big test before we can go on to Challenger Deep.

And were going to start to squeeze all the submersible systems

with this extreme pressure.

Were also going to go to the limits of our communications

and tracking.

Pull in that line!

Oh, no.

Guys, getting pretty

close to the ship here.

That's not good.

She's getting close.

Hold it there!

GUYS, guys, guys, come on.

Guys, I'm looking right

into the starboard props here.

Keep it coming.

Keep it tight.

I'll bet

they didnt intend that.

And release, release, release.

(James narrating) When the dive begins, its exciting.

You know, the divers become

little tiny stick figures

and everything just

kind of disappears.

And then you just

go into darkness.

You can see the plankton

going by and...

and you just fall

for a long, long time.

Everybody says I cant

stretch my arms out in here.

I can stretch

to there and to there.

III be at 18,000 feet

here in a second.

Its the depth Bud Brigman

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