Bathyscaphe Trieste
Trieste is a Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe, which with its crew of two reached a record maximum depth of about , in the deepest known part of the Earth's oceans, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific. On 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard (son of the boat's designer Auguste Piccard) and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh achieved the goal of Project Nekton.
Chikyū
According to the IODP, on 27 April 2012, "Chikyū" drilled to a depth of 7,740 meters (25,400 feet) below sea level, setting a new world record for deep-sea drilling. This record has since been surpassed by the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon mobile offshore drilling unit, operating on the Tiber prospect in the Mississippi Canyon Field, United States Gulf of Mexico, when it achieved a world record for total length for a vertical drilling string of 10,062 m (33,011 ft). The previous record was held by the U.S. vessel "Glomar Challenger", which in 1978 drilled to 7,049.5 meters (23,130 feet) below sea level in the Mariana Trench. On 6 September 2012 Scientific deep sea drilling vessel "Chikyū" set a new world record by drilling down and obtaining rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off the Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean.
In addition, the 27 April 2012 drilling set a record for the depth of water for drilling of 6960 m. That record still stands.