欧博娱乐Don Walsh Describes Trip to the Bottom of the
Early on the morning of 23 January, Walsh and Piccard climbed down the ladder in the Trieste’s entrance tunnel and entered the cramped cabin. The pilots jetted a bit of the buoyant gasoline to “get heavy,” iron ballast began to pull the craft downward, and the mission to the deep began. The light vanished, and they fell further and further into the dark, conscious of the crushing pressure outside their steel chamber. The vehicle had dropped to about 9400 meters when a loud bang reverberated through the cabin, shaking the two aquanauts inside. “We looked at all of our indicators, our instruments and such, and everything was normal,” says Walsh. They didn’t know what had caused the noise, but it didn’t seem to be affecting the craft. “So we just decided to continue on down,” Walsh says, “hoping that we’d made the right decision.”