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Jacques Piccard, Undersea Legend, 1922-2008

The oceanographic world suffered a great loss with the death of Jacques Piccard on Saturday. Piccard accomplished a lot in the field of oceanography and engineering, but he is best known for his descent, along with Lt. Don Walsh, to the deepest part of the ocean. It was January 23, 1960 when Piccard and Walsh hopped in a bathyscaphe called Trieste and lowered themselves down, down, down to the floor of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench near Guam. At 10,916 meters below sea level, Trieste touched down on the ocean floor so gently that it didn't even raise a cloud of silt. I interviewed Piccard a couple of years ago, and he told me what he thought was the most important discovery at that depth: a fish. At the time, scientists were wondering what to do with nuclear waste, and they considered dumping it into the Mariana Trench on the assumption that there was no oxygen down there to interact with it. Because Piccard and Walsh saw a fish on the bottom and reported the finding, the ocean floor - and the ocean itself - has been protected from nuclear waste ever since.

People said, oh nuclear waste, we can drop them in the deep trenches and then they would stay there forever. And no, we said no, it’s not true, this fish practically told us that we are not to drop any nuclear waste in the bottom of the trenches, because we know that the water is finally coming back to the surface, and all the sea would be damaged, all the oceans would be damaged by the nuclear waste.

Despite all the advances made in sea exploration since that day nearly fifty years ago, nobody has yet returned to that spot in the deep blue. But Monsieur Piccard accomplished enough with his one dive to last a half century and beyond.

[Photo: 24heures.ch]

Related Stories:
· Undersea Explorer Piccard Dies, Aged 86 [AP]
· An Interview with Jacques Piccard [New York City Diary]
· Submarine Coverage [Jaunted]