Proezas de Piccard (II): ...and below all the waves

2010/12/01 Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika
• Ozeanografia
• Biografiak
• Historia

"You are going down. Submerged cover. The half tower is submerged. It has disappeared. Let's disconnect the phone cable". The communication broke and slowly entered the darkness. Phosphorescent animals were seen. 900 m. They continued down. Perhaps too fast. They could throw some straw, but they had no time to lose. Although it was difficult to imagine in that calm, the waves were at the top, and the announcement said it was going to get worse. 2.000 m. It was an exciting time for Aguste Piccard, he knew he was entering unoccupied waters. In 1931 he received feelings of his ascent to the stratosphere with Kipfer. But there the comparison ended: this time there was no sun, no moon, no stars, but darkness. And he did not have Kipfer, but his son Jackes.

It was the last day of September 1953. To the south of the Italian island of Ponza, father and son Piccard traveled to the batiscafe Trieste, designed by themselves. 2,500 m. They threw a little ballast to reduce the speed. 3.000 m. They needed it very close to the bottom, now they had to throw more straw. They suffered a small blow: they were in the background. 3.167m. There was never one so low (better said, no one came back so down).

They threw all the ballast to ascend. But they did not move. The bottom mud held the batisfate. They got nervous. But at a given moment he went up. Getting faster and faster. Phosphorescent animals appeared. First rays of light. Increasingly clear. And finally, the beat of the waves. Meteorologists were right: the sea was bad.

Piccard breaks brands again. The same man who climbed the stratosphere globally broke all records under the same water, 20 years later. But Piccard's goal was not to break brands, but to open up new avenues of research, to discover ways to observe what until then could not be observed.

And diving into the bottom of the sea was an ancestral dream. He studied at the Zurich Polytechnic School and was fascinated by a book by zoologist Carl Chun. Valdivia was the account of the oceanographic expedition. In that expedition they launched networks at very high depths. In those who went up at night appeared phosphorescent animals that were immediately off. The only way to properly observe these animals was to move to their place of residence. "It must be possible," Piccardek-thought, "to build a cabin that will not allow water to enter, that will hold the underwater pressure, in order to admire through its windows this new world." He calculated that the cabin would be heavier than the water he would move, so he would have to hang it from some container with some substance lighter than water. As in the case of the balloon. Thus was born the first idea of baptism.

The student became an engineer and then a physicist. And the idea of exploring the seabed in a "balloon" was not removed from his head. But before, he came to the stratosphere.

When he realized that to investigate cosmic rays he had to deal with the low stratospheric pressure, he thought: "The solution is in my submerged cabin." Thus, "against what everyone thinks -- I was going to write -- I took the whipper to the stratosphere."

After conquering the stratosphere, Piccard returned to the original idea. I wanted to convert the stratospheric balloon into underwater balloon. To this end, he requested funding from the Belgian entity Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique. Thanks to this organization, he also performed the stratospheric balloon. The balloon was called FNRS.

Once again, the Belgian organization gave it its approval. The underwater balloon called him the baptism he had designed for 1937. They also began to be built, but II. The World War caused the rupture. It resumes in 1945 and the FNRS-2 is created. It consisted basically of a spherical steel cabin crowned by a large floating tank. The tank was to be filled with gasoline (lighter than water) and to be able to sink it had two steel cylinders, full of iron granules, which crossed the flotation tank. Thanks to this ballast would sink the bevel and, once released the iron granalla, would ascend. Like a balloon.

In 1948 the first tests were conducted in Cape Verde. Things were not all right, and in addition the bad sea caused great damage to the FNRS-2.

However, the French army realized the value of the batiskafo and bought the project to the Belgians. They would make a new batiskafo: FNRS-3 . Piccard was a consultant in Toulon. But the scientist did not perform well in that position. He had little freedom and things were not done to his liking.

In the spring of 1952 he had a more tempting offer. Parents Aguste and Jackes proposed a new baptism from Trieste. They accepted the Italian offer and founded the batiscafo Trieste. With him they marked 3.167 meters parents and children in 1953. But the brand would last little, since the following year the French went down to 4.000 meters with the FNRS-3. Auguste retired that year, with 70 years. Four years later the American army bought Trieste and hired his son Piccard.

On January 23, 1960, Lieutenant Jackes Piccard and Donald Walsh were on the deepest point of the Marian fossa. Rough sea. At 8:00 the balancing batisfora was introduced. 85,000 l of gasoline in the tank.

16 tons of iron loaded and the Trieste began to sink. 200 m. Darkness. 2.000 m. Dressed in jerseys. Hours ahead. 9.500 m. An explosion hit the cabin! Waiting for the worst, the two men contract. They did not know, but what had been broken was a window of the entrance tunnel. Seeing that all the indicators were fine, they decided to move forward.

At 4 hours and 48 minutes from their departure they reached the bottom. 10.916 m. More than a ton of water per square centimeter to enter the interior. There they were 20 minutes performing various measurements and observations. And Piccard saw something like a language. At the bottom of the ocean there were also living beings!

The surface came out at 16:56. It was never so low. It has never been so low.