By David Helvarg

On November 12, Capt. Don Walsh (U.S. Navy retired) died at the age of 92. As a Navy lieutenant in 1960, he and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard dove to the deepest point in the ocean, almost 7 mi. down into the Pacific’s Challenger Deep in the bathyscaphe Trieste. In the following decades, Walsh continued to push the boundaries of ocean science, policy, safety and marine exploration. Last year, he talked about his historic dive and its legacy on Blue Frontier’s podcast. 

How were you selected for the Challenger Deep dive?

I always wanted to be a sailor. And by the time I got out of high school in 1949, there weren’t any jobs in the Merchant Marine so that the only way I could get to sea was to join the Navy. I thought, well, I’ve got to go to college anyway, so I asked for the entrance exams for Annapolis [the U.S. Naval Academy] and went off to do that, but the year I was to graduate, I found out my eyes weren’t good enough to fly. So, I basically went in another direction, submarines. And from submarines, I accessed the Trieste [bathysphere] program. I was the first volunteer. I passed the Navy’s high standards for deep submersible pilot by being the only volunteer. They were developing this plan to hit the lowest point on earth, to go into the Challenger Deep.

I made my first dive in the Trieste of 4,000 feet. Well, golly, five months earlier I’d gone to my submarine’s deepest possible depth it could go, according to Navy regulations, at 300 feet. Now I’m at 4,000 feet. I’m thinking, boy, this is pretty special. And, you know, why 4,000 feet? Because that’s as deep as we could get off San Diego, operating out of the Navy lab.

And then it was revealed to me that actually we’re trying to prepare the bathyscaphe to dive to the deepest place in the world ocean. If you can dive to 20,000 feet, you can see 98 percent of the seafloor. Only 2 percent is deeper than 20,000 feet. And that’s where you get in your deep trenches, which are mostly over 30,000 feet deep. And there’s a series of them around the world, but that’s only 2 percent [of the ocean]. So, we’ve never been there to do scientific research. And I want to emphasize that the Office of Naval Research, the Navy, bought the Trieste to use it as a research platform to be able to take the trained mind to the deepest places in the ocean. It was an oceanographic research platform. Our job initially at the Navy Lab was to test it to the extreme to make sure it was a safe, productive platform for civilian oceanographers to use. Picard and myself, as a couple of engineers, we were test pilots to see if the thing could, you know, exist at the deepest possible depth. Because we had no way of testing it, putting it in some test chamber or put 16,000 pounds per square inch pressure on this thing. You just couldn’t duplicate that with some kind of test facility, so we tested it by doing it.

To get into the cabin of the Trieste, when it’s floating on the surface, the cabin, the sphere, is hanging underneath the flotation, or the float as we call it, which is filled with aviation gasoline because that’s how we get our buoyancy. It’s an underwater balloon, but you can’t put a gas in there like helium or hydrogen because you take a child’s balloon, squish it flat with your hand–you’ve got to have something solid, easy to manage, medium fluid that’s lighter than water. Well, oil floats on water, doesn’t it? And if you get the lightest possible fraction of petroleum that’s commonly found from a supply point of view, then it’s aviation gasoline. Especially in the Navy, everywhere you go, you can get gasoline. Now, we didn’t use it except as buoyancy. We use a fraction of it to adjust buoyancy on a dive. But basically, when we were getting ready to take it out of the water to maintain it, we gave the gas back to the Navy. And the people at the Naval Air Station at North Island, San Diego, could never understand why a perfectly good Navy vessel would want to give back aviation gasoline, but somebody had 54,000 gallons of it and it kept us afloat.

So, the ball, the cabin where we lived, is hanging beneath that float. It’s about 18 feet below the water. So, you have to some way access it when you’re floating on the surface. So there’s this tube that comes down through the float, the gas tank if you will. Just a cylinder tube with a ladder. And at the bottom is the hatch to get into the cabin. The top is another hatch to keep water out when you’re towing it on the surface. But during the dive, you don’t need that space to be empty so you just let it free flood, let it fill with water. Well, at the back of that tube, where it comes down beneath the float, there was a curved plastic window. That allowed us to look through a viewport in the entrance hatch to look aft, look at the back end of the submersible. It was not for piloting or making scientific observations, it was just an operational convenience to have that window. Well, when they built this window, they didn’t elongate the holes for the bolts that hold it to the metal frame. In other words, they were circular holes rather than oval. Well, plastic is exactly that. When it gets under pressure on both sides, take a piece of modeling clay, put it between your hands and push, what happens? Squirts out the edges, doesn’t it? Well, if that’s not free to move on the edges [along an oval hole], this stores up a lot of energy. That’s what happened.

We get to 30,000 feet, there’s this great bang. And we don’t know what it is. We know we’re okay. All the gauges read fine, no problem. I mean, if it hadn’t been a pressure boundary, we wouldn’t even have been aware that we were dead, because it would happen faster than your brain could take aboard the fact that you’re dead. It makes sense. So that’s what happened. And that’s why it happened.

Now the problem there is, okay, there’s a crack in that window. We didn’t know what it was until we landed on the bottom and I turned on the light to look back at the other end, the back end across that window.  ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ we said, ‘let’s continue,’ and then we got to the bottom, I figured out what it was. I said ‘This is the problem, okay.’  We get back up, we can, from inside the cabin, use compressed air we got, you know, turn a valve to blow the water out of that trunk, that tube, okay? So, we can let ourselves out, open the hatch, go up the ladder, go topside. We don’t need external help. You can hear the air blowing, and you can see the water come by the window there and the water level, and the air starts blowing free like it’s not being resisted. Then, you know, it’s dry, you can turn off the air, open the hatch and go out. Now if that crack was too big, then as soon as you turn the air off, the water would come back in.

Fortunately, we got back up to the surface and put the air in, and it seemed to be stable, so we decided better get out of there pretty fast. We climbed out, shut the hatch behind us, pulled it shut in case water did come in eventually, went up the ladder, and the rest is history.

That was a 9-hour dive. It was 5 hours and some change going down. We stayed 20 minutes on the bottom, and then the rest of the time was coming back up. We went down very slowly because no one had any really good seafloor charts or topography. You know, we don’t want to get spiked on a seam as we’re going down or hit something because we’re not aligned up with the trench. We had no machines to measure the depths. No one had the ability to, you know, bottom scan sonar systems that map out the seafloor in great detail. Those were decades away.

Why didn’t this become the first of a major exploration program for the deep ocean like the Mercury capsule led us into space?

Well, you know, we were slightly ahead of, but not that far ahead of, NASA being formed. And we were always in the umbra of the National Space Program. It’s, you know, sexy. A lot of talk about son et lumière, the idea that these guys are wearing these really nice pajamas and the American flag here and their funny hats. I understand it’s all safety stuff. And then getting in this thing built by the low bidder and there was huge noise and the rocket going up. We couldn’t do that. I mean, all we did is get in the thing, and when we dove, you see the swirl of bubbles where the sub went under. No noise, no fancy clothing. So, we weren’t as sexy as space. And with all due credit to them, in another life, I did apply for the Apollo program, because that’s where I did my doctoral dissertation in remote sensing oceanography. So, I respect the space program. I’m just saying parity would have been nice in terms of budgets and policy. And we have a blue world that we still haven’t explored at the levels we’ve explored the moon and Mars. It would be 54 years before another person went to the deepest point on our planet.

And you were there on his mothership when Jim Cameron did that in 2012.

 Yeah, cuz I had worked a little bit as a technical adviser on ‘The Abyss.’ I was on the faculty at USC, and the Navy motion picture office in Hollywood would call me up, or if they needed a technical adviser on films that the Navy just couldn’t afford it to loan them an officer, a serving officer, they’d ask me if I’d do this. So Jim and I were acquainted and he asked me to come down to Malibu to visit his office. He said, you know, ‘I got this, I had this dream that I want to build a couple of one-man submersibles to go to the deepest place in the world ocean.’ With one man, we can really reduce the engineering complexity and do an effective job. And he said, ‘Do you want to go along?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ You know, in for seconds. It turned out eventually that he only built one sub, but I was involved a bit towards the end when he was completing the construction in Australia.

And then I was actually on board the mothership with Jim when he made his dive. I was the last person to talk to him and the first person to greet him when he came back up. That was nice. I never thought anybody would get back there 52 years later. Because Jacques and I, after he surfaced after our dive in January 1960, we were waiting to be picked up by the boat from the mothership. And we were just talking about, well, when do you think the next person is going to be here? The next people will be doing this sort of thing? And we kind of agreed it’d be maybe around two years, maybe three years, somebody’d come back. I didn’t realize it’d be 52 years. I never thought I’d live to see all of this.

And then, you know, surprise, not only was I on Jim’s expedition, I was on Victor Vescovo’s expedition in 2019, when he dove his sub, his two-man sub, to the Challenger Deep. Victor’s done that 14 times, so you want to talk about a reliable, repeatable system, that’s what you’re talking about.

And your son got to go down with him in 2020?

Yeah, I would have never asked Victor for that because I know what they cost. And he’s in for about $50 million to build a sub and all that. I think the burn rate is about a million dollars a month. So, it’s precious time. Each of those seats is precious. He said, well, I’d like to do it. He just did it because he thought it’d be a nice thing to do. So, he and Kelly had a grand time, and, yeah, Kelly’s been dining out on it ever since.

What are your thoughts on, say, deep-sea mining, extracting minerals from the bottom of the sea?

I wholly agree with the people who hold a negative opinion of it right now. I mean, on land we don’t hesitate to do environmental impact studies before we undertake most major activities that will have an effect on the environment. And I don’t understand why that’s not considered to be the same rule when you’re in the oceans. They haven’t done that kind of work. And the International Seabed Authority, which is a UN agency located in Kingston, Jamaica, they kind of govern the allocation of mining sites and that sort of thing, I think that they’re moving too quickly. They have not had the budgets they need to really invoke a full-grown environmental study program of various mining sites. The thing is, it is an activity that’s going to disrupt where you’re working. It doesn’t differentiate between the ore, if you will, the material they bring up, and the things that live with that ore on the seafloor. You’re going to scrape them up. And these are organisms, many of them taking thousands of years to populate an area. They’re not going to repopulate quickly. It’s just like you would clear cut a forest. If you don’t replant, then you get a lot of junk stuff, moves in and grows because they’re not competing anymore with the trees.

I think that there has to be a convincing amount of study being done and on types of potential mining sites. And it would be nice if it was site specific. In other words, you get a license to mine, it’s two steps, just like offshore petroleum. You get an exploration permit, and you can go test an area to see if there’s anything there. Just like you drill test wells in offshore oil and gas development, you get a lot of dry holes. So, you’re not going to move a whole production operation into that area until you’ve done that exploratory drilling. And so, exploratory mining, I think is okay. I would, before that, first of all, check out an area. Is there anything there of value? That’s called a resource, something of value. And it’s a difference between a mineral and an ore, if you will. It’s economically valuable. And so, I think that that’s permissible because your impact on doing test mining is pretty minimal compared to full on scale commercial mining. So, I can support that, but I can’t support awarding mining permissions or licenses to areas that have not been carefully studied.

I think that with respect to ocean mining, the ISA needs to look in the mirror. I’m not saying they’re invertebrate, but they seem to be more governed by the users, the potential users [mining companies], than the overall consideration of the health of the oceans. And that’s got to stop. Overall, I would hope that ISA would get some backbone and become truly independent and a steward, if you will, responsible for stewardship of these deep ocean resources.

As to fisheries, that’s just greed, isn’t it? And it’s gotten worse. And the only thing we don’t need, in my view, in world fisheries, global fisheries, is better technology. Because right now they can vacuum up everything. And we know that some top species are under severe pressure, if not extinct. And, you’ve got these motherships, you get slavery at sea. They don’t even need to go home. The mothership brings out fuel and groceries to the catcher boats, picks up the fish catch, takes it back. And yes, there are ways of limiting this abuse, you know, the electronic beacon systems. They put AIS on ships–they turn them off. And I think what you need to do is go for port sanctions that, okay, mothership, you better carry a lot of fuel because there’s no port in the world that’s going to refuel you. You’ve got to go back to your flag country. And then through our diplomacy, we lean hard on these flag states that have these basically pirate fishing boats because we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.

If it’s not that, then we can worry about the ocean becoming more acidic, so fewer fish are being produced by nature. So, there’s a lot of competing things, and all is not good news. I’m wondering whether or not the world can really act in time to save a great deal of what’s happening to the oceans. I mean, I remember talking about this with Jacques Cousteau many, many years ago, when he was first sounding the call that the oceans are dying. And I thought, well, that’s good press and it’s good for your visibility, kind of doing ‘the sky is falling’ sort of thing. But I’m thinking he was just a real pioneer in seeing the trouble with the health of the oceans. Because everything I look at is not very positive. I can’t see good news coming.

Well, I guess one piece of good news is that at one point the ocean was very limited to a small number of people. Where now I think the general population is getting information about the challenges, and there’s more engagement, more cross-collaboration, and the word is getting out. So having this precautionary principle [do no harm], which you’re talking about for deep ocean mining, and being aware of how nations can actually work with their communities to solve these problems, I think is a little bit of good news, yeah. 

David Helvarg is a writer and the executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean media and policy group. He is the co-host of Rising Tide – The Ocean Podcast.