![]() Vescovo also bought a ship, the dssv Pressure Drop, which he fitted out with an advanced sonar-imaging system to map the seafloor in unprecedented detail. Banks’s sci-fi Culture novels) was the most advanced private submersible ever built. Three years in development, at a cost of $US49 million ($73 million), the Limiting Factor (named for a spacecraft in Iain M. So in 2015 Vescovo hired Triton Submarines, a company that makes private submersibles, to build him a craft that could take him to them. No one had ever reached the deepest points in all five oceans. When Vescovo set out, only three men had ever seen it. The ocean’s deepest point, the Pacific’s Challenger Deep, is nearly 11 km down. At that point, submariners enter what oceanographers call the Hadal Zone, derived from Hades – the Ancient Greek god of the underworld. Apart from Vescovo’s, fewer than 10 manned craft are currently able to operate below 3700 metres, the ocean’s average depth, and no other active ones can go below 7500 metres. At 100 metres the pressure is ten times that on the surface at 2000 metres, it is great enough to collapse a US Navy submarine. The deep ocean is the Earth’s last great unexplored frontier. The Limiting Factor is manouvered into position. Every continent was mapped and visible on Google Earth. Now, at 53, there were no mountains higher. He had scaled the tallest mountain on every continent and skied the last degree to both Poles, making him one of only a few dozen people to have completed the “Explorer’s Grand Slam”. Tall and athletic, with a blond ponytail and white beard, Vescovo is a Texan private-equity investor. Vescovo braced as a wave rocked the hull. ![]() Eight kilometres below him, at the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench, lay his destination: the Brownson Deep, the deepest point in the Atlantic. Stooping slightly inside the crew compartment – a snug titanium sphere 1.5 metres across with two white leather seats and three portholes the size of dinner plates – Victor Vescovo looked into the gloom. Gleaming white, with a hull the shape of a hip flask, its lights gave the water an otherworldly glow. The submarine DSV Limiting Factor bobbed in the Atlantic swell.
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