Humans reach the deepest point in the ocean
On this day · 23 January 1960
Two men in a steel sphere sank for nearly five hours to touch the bottom of the Mariana Trench, then waited to rise.
On January 23, 1960, the bathyscaphe Trieste settled onto the floor of the Challenger Deep, the lowest known point in the Mariana Trench, roughly 35,800 feet beneath the Pacific. Aboard were Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh, crammed into a thick-walled observation sphere slung beneath a tank of gasoline that gave the craft its buoyancy.
The descent took nearly five hours. On the way down, a window cracked with a jolt that shook the whole vessel, but the two pressed on. At the bottom they spent about twenty minutes peering into the dark before beginning the long climb back to the surface.
For more than half a century, Piccard and Walsh remained the only people to have reached that depth. No one returned until filmmaker James Cameron made a solo dive in 2012.
They had gone as deep as it is possible to go and still be standing on Earth.
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