Victor Vescovo had been descending through the waters of the Pacific Ocean for more than two hours. The headlights on the exterior of his state-of-the-art submersible illuminated only a tiny slice of this strange world. An aquatic creature he couldn’t identify floated by.
Fifty-three-year-old Vescovo, his long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, meticulously monitored the operation of the submersible, which he had christened the Limiting Factor. He watched the depth gauge creep up: 7,192 meters, the depth of his dive to the bottom of the Java Trench; 7,434 meters, the depth he’d reached at the bottom of the South Sandwich Trench; 8,376 meters—now he had surpassed the deepest point he’d ever taken the Limiting Factor, on an earlier descent to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench.
He dove deeper.
“Surface. LF. Depth 1-0-9er-2-8 meters,” Vescovo reported, about three-and-a-half hours after he slipped beneath the waves on the morning of April 28. Through the small windows of the submersible, he could see a cloud of tawny silt erupt as the Limiting Factor touched down. “At bottom. Repeat. At bottom.”
Vescovo was all alone at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest section of the Mariana Trench, about 175 miles southwest of Guam and almost 7 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It would take about 7 seconds for his message to reach the support ship, the Pressure Drop, so for the moment Vescovo was the only one who knew that—at 10,928 meters below sea level—he had traveled deeper than any human before him.
