What is the deepest diving expedition recorded?
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.
Deep diving
Deep diving can mean something else in the commercial diving field. For instance early experiments carried out by Comex S.A. (Compagnie maritime d'expertises) using hydrox and trimix attained far greater depths than any recreational technical diving. One example being the Comex Janus IV open-sea dive to in 1977. The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of Comex divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Hydra 8 programme. These divers needed to breathe special gas mixtures because they were exposed to very high ambient pressure (more than 50 times atmospheric pressure).
Deep sea
In 1960, the Bathyscaphe "Trieste" descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near Guam, at , the deepest known spot in any ocean. If Mount Everest (8,848 metres) were submerged there, its peak would be more than a mile beneath the surface. The "Trieste" was retired, and for a while the Japanese remote-operated vehicle (ROV) Kaikō was the only vessel capable of reaching this depth. It was lost at sea in 2003. In May and June 2009, the hybrid-ROV (HROV) "Nereus" returned to the Challenger Deep for a series of three dives to depths exceeding 10,900 meters.
Gouffre Jean-Bernard
Gouffre Jean-Bernard or Réseau Jean Bernard, sometimes known simply as Jean Bernard, is one of the deepest caves known in the world. It is in the Alps in Samoëns, France. The first entrance to the cave was found by the French caving group Groupe Vulcain in 1963. More entrances have been found over the years since, and currently at least thirteen are known. The highest entrance, known as C37, is at above sea level. The cave is named after Jean Dupont and Bernard Raffy, two Groupe Vulcain members who died in 1963 in an unrelated expedition.
Hadal zone
James Cameron also reached the bottom of Mariana Trench in March 2012 using the "Deepsea Challenger". The descent of the "Deepsea Challenger" was unable to break the deepest dive record set by Piccard and Walsh by about 100 meters, however Cameron holds the record for the deepest solo dive.
Deep sea community
The deep sea, or deep layer, is the lowest layer in the ocean, existing below the thermocline, at a depth of 1000 fathoms (1800 m) or more. The deepest part of the deep sea is Mariana Trench located in the western North Pacific. It is also the deepest point of the earth's crust. It has a maximum depth of about 10.9 km which is deeper than the height of Mount Everest. In 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard reached the bottom of Mariana Trench in the "Trieste" bathyscaphe. The pressure is about 11,318 metric tons-force per square meter (110.99 MPa or 16100 psi).
Deepsea Challenger
Deepsea Challenger (DCV 1) is a deep-diving submersible designed to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest-known point on Earth. On 26 March 2012, Canadian film director James Cameron piloted the craft to accomplish this goal in the second manned dive reaching the Challenger Deep. Built in Sydney, Australia by the research and design company Acheron Project Pty Ltd, "Deepsea Challenger" includes scientific sampling equipment and high-definition 3-D cameras, and reached the ocean's deepest point after two hours and 36 minutes of descent from the surface.
Operation Wigwam
Operation Wigwam involved a single test of the Mark 90 Betty nuclear bomb. It was conducted between "Operation Teapot" and "Project 56" on May 14, 1955, about southwest of San Diego, California. 6,800 personnel aboard 30 ships were involved in "Wigwam". The purpose of "Wigwam" was to determine the vulnerability of submarines to deeply detonated nuclear weapons, and to evaluate the feasibility of using such weapons in a combat situation. The task force commander, Admiral John Sylvester, was embarked on the task force flagship . WIGWAM was the first atomic test in the deep ocean, and it remains the only test that has been conducted in water deeper than 1000 ft.
The test device was suspended to a depth of by cable attached to a barge. A tow line connected the 205 ft. (a ) and the shot barge itself. Suspended from the tow lines of other tugs were three miniature unmanned submarines named "Squaws", each packed with cameras and telemetry instruments.
Altitude diving
Although no official records are recognized, until 2007 the highest recorded altitude at which a scuba dive had been conducted was , by a team led by Charles Brush and Johan Reinhard in 1982 in Lago Licancabur. This record was equaled by a team led by Nathalie Cabrol (SETI Institute/NASA Ames) in 2006. That year, Cabrol set the highest recorded altitude scuba diving for women. She also free dived at Lake Licancabur in 2003 and 2004.
Maurice Fargues
In September 1947, just before the "Salon Nautique" in Paris, Cousteau insisted to organize a series of deep diving attempts to determine the maximum depth a scuba diver could reach. On September 17, Maurice Fargues made the first deep diving attempt near the French Navy base at Toulon. Maurice Fargues descended an anchor line with marker slates attached at 10 metres intervals, allowing him to sign his name on them to certify the depth he had reached, and periodically tugged on a safety line attached to his weight belt to let his colleague Frédéric Dumas on the surface know that he was alive. After three minutes, at a record-setting depth of , Maurice Fargues stopped signalling. Philippe Tailliez ordered that he be pulled up, and Jean Pinard dove to meet him at 60 meters depth, only to discover that Fargues was unconscious, his mouthpiece hanging on his chest. Resuscitation attempts were continued for twelve hours, but Fargues was dead. Nitrogen narcosis or oxygen toxicity had caused him to lose his mouthpiece and drown.
Bill Nagle
Bill Nagle was one of the earliest divers to dive regularly beyond diver training agency specified depth limits for safe deep diving (normally 130 feet in sea water). Nagle regularly dived to greater depths, and engaged in hazardous shipwreck penetration, often on previously unexplored shipwrecks.
Whilst Nagle was by no means the first diver to start diving at great depths (Sheck Exley was generating considerable fame even before Nagle engaging in extremely deep cave diving), it was his pioneering approach to wrecks that set him apart from other divers of his era.
In 1985 Bill Nagle led the team of divers, including Gary Gentile, Art Kirchner, Tom Packer, Mike Boring, John Moyer and Kenny Gascon, who recovered the bell of the "Andrea Doria", which had previously been thought lost and unrecoverable. The story of the recovery expedition is recounted in Gary Gentile's book, "Andrea Doria: Dive to an Era".
Bill Nagle was also one of the first people in the Northeastern United States to commence dive chartering as a full-time business with the custom dive vessel, the "Seeker". The "Seeker" specialised in taking experienced wreck divers to the more remote and dangerous wrecks in the North East. It became an extremely competitive business as diving deep wrecks became more popular, and Nagle's bitter feud with rival captain, Steve Bielenda, after the latter was designated "King of the Deep" in a feature in "Time magazine" is carefully chronicled in the book "Shadow Divers".
In subsequent years, diving beyond recreational diving limits would become refined as a sport in itself, known as "technical diving", with its own dedicated training and procedures. During Bill Nagle's prime, divers who exceeded agency specified safety limits were simply referred to as "gorilla divers". Bill Nagle died shortly before the advent of trimix became popular amongst non-professional divers, dramatically reducing the risks associated with diving deep wrecks. Today many of the wrecks that Bill Nagle first explored diving on air with outdated US Navy Decompression tables are routinely dived by divers who have received technical training and who are breathing trimix and using modern dive computers.
Deep-sea exploration
In 1948, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard tested a much deeper-diving vessel he invented called the bathyscaphe, a navigable deep-sea vessel with its gasoline-filled float and suspended chamber or gondola of spherical steel. On an experimental dive in the Cape Verde Islands, his bathyscaphe successfully withstood the pressure on it at , but its body was severely damaged by heavy waves after the dive. In 1954, with this bathyscaphe, Piccard reached a depth of . In 1953, his son Jacques Piccard joined in building new and improved bathyscaphe , which dived to in field trials. The United States Navy acquired "Trieste" in 1958 and equipped it with a new cabin to enable it to reach deep ocean trenches. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and United States Navy Lieutenant Donald Walsh descended in "Trieste" to the deepest known point on Earth - the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, successfully making the deepest dive in history: .
An increasing number of occupied submersibles are now employed around the world. The American-built that is operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is a three-person submarine that can dive to about and is equipped with a mechanical manipulator to collect bottom samples. "Alvin" made its first test dive in 1964, and has performed more than 3,000 dives to average depths of . "Alvin" has also involved in a wide variety of research projects, such as one where giant tube worms were discovered on the Pacific Ocean floor near the Galápagos Islands.
Tonga Trench
The deepest point of the Tonga Trench, the Horizon Deep at , is deep, making it the deepest point in the Southern Hemisphere and the second deepest on Earth after the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. It is named for the research vessel "Horizon" of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the crew of which found the deep in December 1952.
Pierre Chevalier (caver)
Pierre Chevalier (24 April 1905 – 4 December 2001) was a well-known caver and mountaineer from France, with many alpine ascents and cave explorations to his credit. Chevalier is principally known for the exploration of the Dent de Crolles cave system over a twelve-year period (1936 – 1947), which became the deepest cave in the world. Chevalier recorded this exploration in his book "Escalades souterraines" ("Subterranean Climbers").
Underwater explosion
The Operation Wigwam test in 1955 occurred at a depth of , the deepest detonation of any nuclear device.
Sarma cave
Sarma Cave (), located in Gagra District, Abkhazia, Georgia, is the third deepest recorded cave in the world. Its current depth (1830 m) was measured in 2012 by a team led by Pavel Rudko.
Boybuloq Cave
Expeditions resumed in 2007 and a 25-man joint Russian-French-Swiss series of expeditions was carried out from 2018. One key focus of the expeditions, which will continue in 2019, was to search for a connection to the nearby Vishnevsky Cave, the second deepest cave in the area. The 2018 expeditions mapped more than of new passages in the caves and discovered several promising leads for new explorations. A series of dinosaur footprints were also discovered near the Boybuloq Cave entrance by a team from the Yekaterinburg Caving Club and explorations of the Vishnevsky Cave reached a new depth of .
Kaikō ROV
In March 1995, "Kaikō" became the second vessel ever to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and the first craft to visit this location since the "Trieste" mission. The maximum depth measured on that dive was 10,911.4 meters, marking the deepest dive for an unmanned submersible to date. On 31 May 2009, "Nereus" became the third vessel to visit the bottom of the Challenger Deep, reaching a maximum recorded depth of 10,902 meters.
Hranice Abyss
The Hranice Abyss (), the English name adopted by the local tourist authorities, is the deepest flooded pit cave in the world. It is a karst sinkhole located near the town of Hranice (Přerov District). The greatest confirmed depth (as of 27 September 2016) is 473 m (404 m under the water level), which makes it the deepest known underwater cave in the world. Moreover, the expected depth is 800–1200 m.
Agnes Milowka
In the effort coordinated by Victorian Speleological Association in 2009, she and James Arundale explored Elk River streamway cave system by an additional , which has potential to become the longest continuous stream passage in Victoria, Australia. In a 2009 expedition near Cocklebiddy, she reached the midpoint of Craig Challen’s 2008 line giving her the record for the longest cave dive in Australia for a female. She worked as an underwater grip in 2008 for a film by Discovery Channel Japan, "Water's Journey" by TV Asahi & Karst Productions. She was part of the National Geographic Nova TV Special expedition to Blue Holes of the Bahamas, in December 2008, as an underwater grip, followed by the expedition to look for similar sinkholes in Queensland, Australia in October 2009.
Submersible
James Cameron made a record-setting, manned submersible dive to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of the Mariana Trench on March 26, 2012. Cameron's submersible was named Deepsea Challenger and reached a depth of .
Jarrod Jablonski
Jablonski has been setting records for cave penetration for many years. In 1995 he and Geologist Todd Kincaid pushed the Manatee Springs cave system to . On April 25, 1997, Jablonski along with George Irvine and Brent Scarabin set a new penetration record of in Wakulla Springs. They utilized Halcyon semi-closed circuit rebreathers at an average depth of . In July 1998 Jablonski, again diving with Irvine and Scarabin traveled in Wakulla Springs O-Tunnel. Jablonski and his regular dive buddy WKPP director Casey McKinlay set a world record for the longest ever penetration on a cave dive, at while exploring "Q" tunnel of Wakulla Springs.
This record remains the longest penetration in a deep cave. The new record for the longest penetration at any depth is now held by Jon Bernot and Charlie Roberson of Gainesville, Florida, with a distance of .
Deepwater Horizon
Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore drilling rig owned by Transocean. Built in 2001 in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the rig was commissioned by R&B Falcon (a later asset of Transocean), registered in Majuro, and leased to BP from 2001 until September 2013. In September 2009, the rig drilled the deepest oil well in history at a vertical depth of and measured depth of in the Tiber Oil Field at Keathley Canyon block 102, approximately southeast of Houston, in of water.
Krubera Cave
In January 2001, the Ukr.S.A. expedition explored the cave to making it the deepest cave in the world. For the first time in the history of speleology, the deepest cave in the world had been established outside of western Europe. Since 2001, the Krubera explorations by the Ukr.S.A. have been undertaken within the frame of the multi-year project named "The Call of the Abyss", coordinated by A. Klimchuk, Y. Kasyan, G. Samokhin and K. Markovskoy. Besides the Ukrainian speleologists, cavers from many countries such as France, Spain, Russia, Moldova, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel and Lithuania have taken part in different expeditions of the Ukr.S.A.
Operation Deep Water
Operation Deep Water took place as part of a series of concurrent NATO exercises held during the fall of 1957 which were the most ambitious military undertaking for NATO to date, involving more than 250,000 men, 300 ships, and 1,500 aircraft operating from Norway to Turkey. These other 1957 exercises were Operation Strikeback, which concentrated on NATO's eastern Atlantic/northern European flank; Operation Counter Punch involving Allied Forces Central Europe on the European mainland; Operation Stand Firm in the English Channel; Operation Sea Watch, a convoy escort exercise in the North Atlantic Ocean; and Operation Fend Off/Operation Fishplay, an anti-submarine exercise in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap ("GIUK gap").
Cave diving
One deep underwater cave in the United States is "Weeki Wachee Spring". Due to its strong outflow, divers have had limited success penetrating this first magnitude spring until 2007, when drought conditions eased the out-flowing water allowing team divers from Karst Underwater Research to penetrate to depths of The current deepest known underwater cave in the United States as of 2013 is Phantom Springs Cave located in west Texas. Phantom Springs has been explored down to in water filled cave passages.
USCGC Alexander Hamilton (WPG-34)
During the deep dive the divers set three Icelandic diving records: Deepest wreck dive in Iceland, deepest sea dive in Iceland, and deepest dive ever made in Iceland.
James Cameron
On March 7, 2012, Cameron took the "Deepsea Challenger" submersible to the bottom of the New Britain Trench in a five-mile-deep solo dive. On March 26, 2012, Cameron reached the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He spent more than three hours exploring the ocean floor before returning to the surface. Cameron is the first person to accomplish the trip solo. He was preceded by unmanned dives in 1995 and 2009 and by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, who were the first men to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench aboard the Bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960. Cameron has made a three-dimensional film of his dive. During his dive to the Challenger Deep, the data he collected resulted in interesting new finds in the field of marine biology, including new species of sea cucumber, squid worm, and giant single-celled amoeba, which are exciting finds due to the harshness of the environment.
HMAS Diamantina (K377)
"Diamantina"’s most notable achievement during her second commission was the discovery of the deepest known part of the Indian Ocean on 7 February 1960, which was named Diamantina Deep after the ship. Based in Fremantle, Western Australia, "Diamantina" remained in service as an oceanographic vessel until 1980; she briefly interrupted these duties in March 1963, escorting the royal yacht during Queen Elizabeth II's tour to Australia.
Deep-sea exploration
In general, modern scientific Deep-sea exploration can be said to have begun when French scientist Pierre Simon de Laplace investigated the average depth of the Atlantic ocean by observing tidal motions registered on Brazilian and African coasts. He calculated the depth to be , a value later proven quite accurate by soundings measurement. Later on, with increasing demand for submarine cables installment, accurate soundings was required and the first investigations of the sea bottom were undertaken. The first deep-sea life forms were discovered in 1864 when Norwegian researchers obtained a sample of a stalked crinoid at a depth of . The British Government sent out the "Challenger" expedition (a ship called ) in 1872 which discovered 715 new genera and 4,417 new species of marine organisms over the space of four years.
Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project
The D/V Chikyu, operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) sailed on IODP Expedition 343 from the port of Shimizu, Shizuoka on April 1, 2012, within 13 months after the earthquake. Chikyu is the only research vessel with the capabilities for the necessary drilling in very deep water of over 6900 meters. Two months of operations from April 1 to 24 May 24, 2012 were scheduled for drilling several boreholes to carry out Logging while drilling (LWD), install temperature sensors and retrieve core samples. The extreme water depths caused many technical challenges that had to be considered, such as the strength of the long pipe string, onboard handling of the pipe sections, and instrument operations at very high water pressure. These aspects needed careful planning and new tools on the ship. Various equipment had not been previously used in such deep water and caused many problems and delays during the first month at sea. Eventually difficult engineering problems were overcome enabling retrieval of borehole core and installation of a temperature observatory across the fault zone at a depth of about 820 meters below the sea floor. New records were set for scientific drilling including, longest drilling string (7740 m) from the ocean surface and deepest core from the ocean surface (7752 m).
Gloria Hollister
Also in Bermuda, Hollister set the world record for the deepest dive undertaken by a woman. She performed the dive in the Bathysphere, a large steel submersible in which Beebe and the Bathysphere’s engineer, Otis Barton, undertook deep sea explorations throughout the early 1930s. On June 11, 1930, her thirtieth birthday, she went down 410 feet for the women’s descent record. In 1934, she would nearly triple her own record by descending to 1,208 feet. The dives were not simply feats for Hollister but, as for Beebe, a chance to explore the deep-sea world.
Neffs Cave
In 1952 the Salt Lake Grotto of the National Speleological Society was established, and several weeks later the grotto's members obtained permission from the National Forest Service to explore the cave. They spent nearly eleven hours in the cave but had not reached the end of the main passage before they had to turn back. Teams from the grotto returned in 1953 and 1956, and in the last visit they succeeded in reaching the bottom of the main passage. They calculated a vertical depth of 1186 feet (361 meters), which was later revised to the present figure of 1163 feet (354 meters). Neffs Cave is the 13th deepest cave discovered in the United States.
Challenger Deep
The 2009 and 2010 maximal depths were not confirmed by the series of dives "Nereus" made to the bottom during an expedition in May–June 2009. The direct descent measurements by the four expeditions which have reported from the bottom, have fixed depths in a narrow range from () to (), to ("Nereus") to () Although an attempt was made to correlate locations, it could not be absolutely certain that "Nereus" (or the other descents) reached exactly the same points found to be maximally deep by the sonar/echo sounders of previous mapping expeditions, even though one of these echo soundings was made by "Nereus" mothership.
Deep Diver
Deep Diver was the name of a deep-sea scientific research submersible built by Edwin Albert Link. "Deep Diver" was the first small submersible designed for lockout diving, allowing divers to leave and enter the craft while underwater. It was first launched in January 1966.
William Beebe
From 1930 to 1934, Beebe and Barton used the Bathysphere to conduct a series of dives of increasing depth off the coast of Nonsuch Island, becoming the first people to observe deep-sea animals in their native environment. The Bathysphere was lowered into the ocean using a steel cable, and a second cable carried a phone line which the Bathysphere's occupants used to communicate with the surface, as well as an electrical cable for a searchlight to illuminate animals outside the Bathysphere. Beebe's observations were relayed up the phone line to be recorded by Gloria Hollister, his chief technical associate who was also in charge of preparing specimens obtained from dredging. Beebe and Barton made a total of 35 dives in the Bathysphere, setting several consecutive world records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human. The record set by the deepest of these, to a depth of on August 15, 1934, lasted until it was broken by Barton in 1949.
Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis
In October 2008, a team from British and Japanese institutes discovered a shoal of "Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis" at a depth of about in the Japan Trench. These were, at the time, the deepest living fish ever recorded on film. The record was surpassed by a type of snailfish filmed at a depth of in December 2014, and extended in May 2017 when another snailfish was filmed at a depth of . This deepest-water so-called "ethereal snailfish" remain undescribed, but a close relative found only slightly shallower in the Mariana Trench was described as "Pseudoliparis swirei" in late 2017.
Hadal zone
The first manned exploration to reach Challenger Deep, the deepest known part of the ocean located in the Mariana Trench, was accomplished in 1960 by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh. They reached a maximum depth of 10,911 meters in the bathyscaphe "Trieste".
John Bennett (diver)
John Bennett (1959–2004) was a British scuba diver who is best known for setting a world record by becoming the first person to deep dive below a depth of on self-contained breathing apparatus on 6 November 2001.
Antarctic Peninsula
The grounding of the Argentine ship "Bahía Paraíso" and subsequent oil spill occurred near the Antarctic Peninsula in 1989. In 2005, Lewis Gordon Pugh broke the farthest-south long distance swim record by undertaking a swim at Petermann Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. In November 2007, the "MV Explorer" rammed submerged sea ice and then sank after water from a fist sized hole could not be pumped out quickly enough. All passengers and crew were safely evacuated and rescued.
Skelton Inlet
The Skelton Inlet is an ice-filled inlet at the terminus of the Skelton Glacier, along the western edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The feature is about 16 km (10 mi) wide at the entry points between Cape Timberlake and Fishtail Point, where it is about 1500 m deep. Its deepest point is 1933 m below sea level. It was discovered by the British National Antarctic Expedition (BrNAE), 1901–04, which named this feature for Lt. Reginald W. Skelton (Royal Navy), chief engineer of the expedition's ship RRS "Discovery".
Jiaolong (submersible)
Jiaolong ( flood dragon) is a Chinese manned deep-sea research submersible that can dive to a depth of over 7,000 m. It has the second-greatest depth range of any manned research vehicle in the world, the only manned expeditions to have gone deeper were the dives of the Trieste bathyscaphe (10,916m) in 1960, Archimède (9,560 m) in 1962, Deepsea Challenger (10,898m) in 2012 (with all three diving to Challenger Deep) and the Limiting Factor which dove 8,370 meters in December 2018 to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench.
Submersible
Some submersibles have been able to dive to great depths. The Bathyscaphe Trieste was the first to reach the deepest part of the ocean, nearly 11 km (7 mi) below the surface, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960.
Emory Kristof
Kristof has participated in multiple undersea expeditions with Canadian explorers Joseph MacInnis and Phil Nuytten, including the exploration of the "Breadalbane", the world's northernmost known shipwreck, and the 1995 expedition to recover the bell from the wreck of the SS "Edmund Fitzgerald". Nuytten also accompanied MacInnis and Russian explorer Anatoly Sagalevich on a descent 16,400 feet into King's Trough in the eastern North Atlantic aboard the submersible "Mir 1", and on the expedition which made the IMAX film "Titanica".
Abyssal plain
The Challenger Deep is the deepest surveyed point of all of Earth's oceans; it is at the south end of the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands group. The depression is named after HMS "Challenger", whose researchers made the first recordings of its depth on 23 March 1875 at station 225. The reported depth was 4,475 fathoms (8184 meters) based on two separate soundings. On 1 June 2009, sonar mapping of the Challenger Deep by the Simrad EM120 multibeam sonar bathymetry system aboard the R/V "Kilo Moana" indicated a maximum depth of 10971 meters (6.82 miles). The sonar system uses phase and amplitude bottom detection, with an accuracy of better than 0.2% of water depth (this is an error of about 22 meters at this depth).
Kaikō ROV
On 23 January 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard were the first men to descend to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the "Trieste" bathyscaphe. Though the initial report claimed the bathyscaphe had attained a depth of 37,800 feet, the maximum recorded depth was later calculated to be . At this depth, the water column above exerts a barometric pressure of , over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Even at this great depth and pressure, a small flounder-like fish was seen moving away from the spotlight of the bathyscaphe. Since then, only one manned vessel has ever returned to the Challenger Deep, the Deepsea Challenger, which was piloted by director James Cameron on March 26, 2012 to the bottom of the trench.
Diving cylinder
with
USS Cooper: Return to Ormoc Bay
A daring world record scuba dive to the sunken is witnessed by a man who nearly perished on that same ship over sixty years ago. The destroyer was found to be at a depth of 633 feet (193 meters) -- deeper than the world record technical dive of 581 feet (177 meters).
Gary Gentile
Gary Gentile is a wreck diver. It has been suggested that Gary Gentile may be the most experienced wreck diver in the world. He has dived on the wreck of the "SS Andrea Doria" (sometimes referred to as the "Mount Everest" of SCUBA diving) over 190 times, and was the first diver to penetrate the first class dining room of the vessel. He was also part of the team of divers, along with Bill Nagle, who recovered the ship's bell in 1985.
List of deepest mines
This list of deepest mines includes operational and non-operational mines that are at least , which is the depth of Veryovkina Cave, the deepest known natural cave in the world. The depth measurements in this list represent the difference in elevation from the entrance of the mine to the deepest excavated point.
David Apperley
David Apperley is an Australian technical diver and cave explorer. Apperley holds instructor levels in cave diving, Deep Mixed Gas Diving and Deep Closed Circuit Rebreather Diving and was the expedition co-ordinator for the Pearse Resurgence Project 1996-2003. 
He was the project leader on the Royal Mail Ship Niagara 2003 Survey Project, which involved the organization and planning of putting some of the worlds most experienced divers onto the 130 metre deep Niagara wreck site, off the North Island of New Zealand.
Scuba diving
The current record for the longest continuous submergence using SCUBA gear was set by Mike Stevens of Birmingham, England at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, during the annual National Boat, Caravan and Leisure Show between February 14 and February 23, 1986. He was continuously submerged for 212.5 hours. The record was ratified by the "Guinness Book of Records".
Abyssobrotula galatheae
Abyssobrotula galatheae, is a species of cusk eel in the family Ophidiidae. It is the deepest-living fish known; one specimen, trawled from a depth of in the Puerto Rico Trench in 1970, holds the record for the deepest fish ever captured. Although generally recognized, some have suggested that the record-breaking individual might have been caught with a non-closing net (a net that is open on the way up and down into the deep) and therefore perhaps caught shallower.
Premier Exhibitions
RMS Titanic Founder G. Michael Harris put the first Salvage Operation of the RMS Titanic in October 1986. The first Titanic expedition began in July 1987 and was financed by Titanic Ventures Limited Partnership, George Tulloch, Connecticut, and Oceanic Research & Exploration, G. Michael Harris, Florida. These co-partners led a $6 million expedition to the ship, and recovered artifacts beneath the surface of the North Atlantic. In order to recover these artifacts, George Tulloch, G. Michael Harris and their team completed 32 dives to Titanic in the “Nautile”, a deep-diving submersible chartered by Oceanic Research and Exploration in a partnership with Ifremer, the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea. This is the greatest number of deep-sea dives ever completed for any televised project. The company had an OTC ticker symbol of SOST. In 1994 it won a Virginia court order to get salvor-in-possession rights to the ship.
Diving watch
In 1960 a Rolex Deep Sea Special prototype diving watch attached to the hull of the bathyscaphe "Trieste" reached a record depth of of seawater during a descent to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point in the oceans. The watch survived and tested as having functioned normally during its descent and ascent. The Deep Sea Special was a technology demonstration and marketing project, and the watch never went into production.
Bathysphere
The Bathysphere (Greek: "βαθύς", "bathus", "deep" and "σφαῖρα", "sphaira", "sphere") was a unique spherical deep-sea submersible which was unpowered and lowered into the ocean on a cable, and was used to conduct a series of dives off the coast of Bermuda from 1930 to 1934. The Bathysphere was designed in 1928 and 1929 by the American engineer Otis Barton, to be used by the naturalist William Beebe for studying undersea wildlife. Beebe and Barton conducted dives in the Bathysphere together, marking the first time that a marine biologist observed deep-sea animals in their native environment. Their dives set several consecutive world records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human. The record set by the deepest of these, to a depth of meters on August 15, 1934, lasted until it was broken by Barton in 1949.
USS Atlanta (CL-51)
In the following years, Denlay and Tysall mounted several larger expeditions to survey "Atlanta", exploring and videoing the wreck in detail to a depth of at the bow. The civil unrest in Solomon Islands from late 1998 prevented further diving around Guadalcanal for several years. However, on the final expedition that year, the then deepest wreck dive by a woman was made by Kevin's wife, Mirja, on "Atlanta". Denlay's last visit to the wreck was in 2002 using a closed circuit rebreather or CCR, the first CCR dive on "Atlanta". Since then, very few dives have been conducted on "Atlanta", although in May 2011 a very experienced deep diving team from "Global Underwater Explorers" successfully videoed the wreck for documentary purposes, the first survey of the wreck since Denlay's expeditions up to 1998.
Caves of the Mendip Hills
Attempts made in the Mendip Hills to traverse from one cave to another through the underground rivers led to the development of cave diving; the first cave dive attempt in Britain took place at Swildon's Hole in 1934. The first successful cave dive in Britain was achieved the following year at Wookey Hole Caves, where the last sump is currently the deepest in Britain at .
Cheyenne (catamaran)
In 2009 Cheyenne was purchased by Chris Welsh from the estate of Steve Fossett. Plans are to launch a deep sea submarine to carry passengers to extreme ocean depths. The deep sea adventure will be supported by Cheyenne, and will use the HOT DeepFlight Challenger sub to plumb the depths of the worlds oceans to full depth. Both of these were owned by Steve Fossett, who had modified the racing catamaran to become the mothership to his oceanic dive record attempt. The submarine seats one person, and is currently the only manned submersible capable of reaching the deepest part of the oceans.The former records have all been broken.
Diving watch
The design and actual availability of divers' watches certified for more than is not explicable solely by practical diving needs.
The diving depth record for off-shore (saturation) diving was achieved in 1988 by a team of professional divers of the Comex S.A., industrial deep-sea diving company performing pipe line connection exercises at a depth of of seawater (msw/fsw) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Hydra 8 programme. In 1992, a Comex diver achieved a record of of seawater in an on-shore hyperbaric chamber as part of the Hydra 10 programme. A hydrogen-helium-oxygen gas mixture was used as breathing gas. The watches used during this scientific record dives were Rolex Sea-Dwellers with a depth rating and these feats were used in advertising.
The complexity, medical problems and physiological limits such as those imposed by high pressure nervous syndrome and accompanying high costs of professional saturation diving to extreme depths and the development of deep water atmospheric diving suits and remotely operated underwater vehicles in offshore oilfield drilling and production effectively nixed the need for ever deeper non-atmospheric manned intervention in the ocean.
DeepFlight Super Falcon
In 2005, Hawkes and adventurer Steve Fossett teamed up to create a submarine that could be piloted by an individual to the deepest part of the ocean. This spot in the Pacific Ocean, called Challenger Deep, is approximately under the ocean's surface and is thought to be the deepest point in the ocean. Together they began to develop the "Challenger" submersible with this goal in mind. However, in 2007 Fossett lost his life in a fatal accident in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California before the feat could be attempted.
Project Nekton
On dive 65 (eighth in the Nekton series), on January 23, 1960, "Trieste" reached the ocean floor in the Challenger Deep (the deepest southern part of the Mariana Trench), carrying Jacques Piccard (son of the boat's designer Auguste Piccard) and Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN. This was the first time a vessel, manned or unmanned, had reached the deepest point in the Earth's oceans. The onboard systems indicated a depth of , although this was later revised to and more accurate measurements made in 1995 have found the Challenger Deep to be slightly shallower, at .
Anatoly Sagalevich
Sagalevich holds the world record for the deepest fresh water dive, at (in Lake Baikal aboard a Pisces in 1990).
David Apperley
A renowned technical cave diver (one of the most dangerous and demanding sports in the world) and gifted marine electrical technician of over two decades, Dave stood out in the field of international deep sea exploration when James Cameron employed him as Lead Safety Diver and Emergency Rescue Manager on the 2012 ‘DeepSea Challenge Project’/Mariana Trench Expedition, which saw Cameron solo man a 12-ton submersible to the deepest point of the Earth’s oceans.
George Stephen Ritchie
From that time he worked continuously in that branch of the Royal Navy travelling all over the World and commanding four of HM surveying Ships: on a world circling voyage with scientists on board; HMNZS "Lachlan", the New Zealand survey ship; , in the Persian Gulf and in the West Indies and North Atlantic. In 1951 on the survey ship HMS "Challenger", recorded the deepest part of the ocean trench depth Challenger Deep of 5,960 fathoms (10,900 m, 35,761 ft) using echo sounding. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Back Award in 1954.
Bathyscaphe
In 1960 "Trieste", carrying Piccard's son Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh, reached the deepest known point on the Earth's surface, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench.
Archimède
On 15 July 1962, "Archimede" descended to into the Kurile-Kamchatcha Trench, making it the second deepest dive ever, at that point in time, second only to the Bathyscaphe Trieste dive on the Challenger Deep.
Jacques Piccard
Jacques Piccard (28 July 19221 November 2008) was a Swiss oceanographer and engineer, known for having developed underwater submarines for studying ocean currents. In the Challenger Deep, he and Lt. Don Walsh of the United States Navy were the first people to explore the deepest part of the world's ocean, and the deepest location on the surface of Earth's crust, the Mariana Trench, located in the western North Pacific Ocean.
Rebecca Lee (explorer)
Rebecca Lee Lok Sze, MH (Traditional Chinese: 李樂詩, born 1944 in Canton) is an explorer from Hong Kong. She is the first Hong Kong person and the first woman to have visited the North Pole, the South Pole, and Mount Everest. She has visited the Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon (the deepest canyon in China) and the Taklamakan (the hottest desert in China).
Submersible
Among the most well-known and longest-in-operation submersibles is the deep-submergence research vessel DSV Alvin, which takes 3 people to depths of up to 4,500 metres (14,800 ft). Alvin is owned by the United States Navy and operated by WHOI, and as of 2011 had made over 4,400 dives.
Caving
Caving was pioneered by Édouard-Alfred Martel (1859–1938), who first achieved the descent and exploration of the Gouffre de Padirac, in France, as early as 1889 and the first complete descent of a 110-metre wet vertical shaft at Gaping Gill, in Yorkshire, England, in 1895. He developed his own techniques based on ropes and metallic ladders. Martel visited Kentucky and notably Mammoth Cave National Park in October 1912. In the 1920s famous US caver Floyd Collins made important explorations in the area and in the 1930s, as caving became increasingly popular, small exploration teams both in the Alps and in the karstic high plateaus of southwest France (Causses and Pyrenees) transformed cave exploration into both a scientific and recreational activity. Robert de Joly, Guy de Lavaur and Norbert Casteret were prominent figures of that time, surveying mostly caves in Southwest France. During World War II, an alpine team composed of Pierre Chevalier, Fernand Petzl, Charles Petit-Didier and others explored the Dent de Crolles cave system near Grenoble, which became the deepest explored system in the world (-658m) at that time. The lack of available equipment during the war forced Pierre Chevalier and the rest of the team to develop their own equipment, leading to technical innovation. The scaling-pole (1940), nylon ropes (1942), use of explosives in caves (1947) and mechanical rope-ascenders (Henri Brenot's "monkeys", first used by Chevalier and Brenot in a cave in 1934) can be directly associated to the exploration of the Dent de Crolles cave system.
Hotel Terme Millepini
Y-40 "The Deep Joy" pool first opened on 5 June 2014 and was designed by architect Emanuele Boaretto. It is deep, making it the deepest pool in the world. It contains 
of thermal water kept at a temperature of . The pool features underwater caves and a suspended, transparent, underwater tunnel for guests to walk through. It includes platforms at various depths, ranging from to , before the walls of the pool narrow into a well-like funnel which plunges straight down to . The hotel offers tickets to freedive and scuba dive. Italian freediver Umberto Pelizzari first measured the depth before the pool was open.
Kathy Troutt
At age 16 Kathy Troutt made the "Guinness Book of Records" for the longest female deep sea scuba dive, breathing ordinary air for 320 feet off Sydney Harbour with former Royal Australian Navy diver, Wally Reynolds. Kathy dived on Sydney Harbour shipwrecks in 1965
Mount Paraw
Jujar is deepest cave of Asia. in 7 September 2015 Jujar cave in eastern front of the Paraw recognized as deepest cave of Iran. an Iranian caving team consist of 24 athlete has discovered 806 meter and 8 centimeter of this cave. before this event Paraw cave (also located in this mount ) was deepest cave of Iran. in August 2016 an international expedition started to discover whole of the cave. eventually they announced that they successfully achieved to more than 1000 meter depth of the cave. thus Jujar became deepest cave of Asia and Iran.
Challenger Deep
The depression is named after the British Royal Navy survey ship , whose expedition of 1872–1876 made the first recordings of its depth. According to the August 2011 version of the GEBCO Gazetteer of Undersea Feature Names, the location and depth of the Challenger Deep are and ±.
Martyn Farr
As well as running a cave diving training facility in South Wales, Farr is a regular contributor to diving magazines around the world. Farr has also acted as support diver in some of the world's most notable cave diving penetrations, including the British-led expedition to Pozo Azul in Spain in September 2010, which at of underwater travel is the world's longest cave diving penetration.
Boybuloq Cave
Boybuloq Cave (also known as Boy Bulok) is a limestone cave in Uzbekistan and the deepest known cave in Asia. It is located high in the Gissar Range of mountains, near to Dehibolo, Uzbekistan's highest village. The cave and wider area is inaccessible for much of the year due to snow. Long-known to local people because of a nearby spring the cave was first explored by speleologists in 1984. Since then expeditions have mapped of passages in the cave and reached a total depth of . The cave could potentially extend much deeper and become the deepest in the world.
FNRS-2
The FNRS-2 was the first bathyscaphe. It was created by Auguste Piccard. Work started in 1937 but was interrupted by World War II. The deep-diving submarine was finished in 1948. The bathyscaphe was named after the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), the funding organization for the venture. FNRS also funded the FNRS-1 which was a balloon that set a world altitude record, also built by Piccard. The FNRS-2 set world diving records, besting those of the bathyspheres, as no unwieldy cable was required for diving. It was in turn bested by a more refined version of itself, the bathyscaphe "Trieste".
Henry Morshead
In 1913 Frederick Bailey, an intelligence officer with the Indian Army, invited Morshead to be the surveyor in an expedition to explore the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon (Tsangpo Gorge), now known to be the world's deepest gorge.
Bailey and Morshead explored from the south with Morshead surveying the entire route and calculating the results as they went so as not to delay progress. By ascending the Dibang River they crossed the Himalayan watershed into Tibet to reach the Dihang River and ascending the Gorge.
Woodville Karst Plain Project
WKPP divers hold every deep (below ) distance record in underwater cave diving. WKPP director Casey McKinlay and Jarrod Jablonski hold the world's record for the greatest distance below ) from air in a cave dive - each way at Wakulla Spring at an average depth of . This record dive required more than 29 hours submersion including 16 hours of decompression (also a record). The WKPP also hold the world's record for the longest traverse between two known entry points - one way between Turner Sink and Wakulla Spring at an average depth of . The WKPP is also responsible for exploring and mapping more cave passageway below 190ft than any other organization in the world - . In total, WKPP explorers have mapped and explored as of June, 2018.
Deep diving
Tatiana Oparina in 2015, reached 156 m in Lake Baikal, the deepest dive in extreme cold water (+3C) by a woman.
Chevé Cave
In 2004, an international caving expedition led by the U.S. Deep Caving Team discovered a new cave they named J2. The entrance of J2 located 5 kilometers northeast of the Chevé Cave entrance. J2 appears to head in the direction of Chevé Cave, with a predicted intersection beyond the tunnel collapse that stopped the team in 2003. Current expeditions are underway to find a connection between J2 and Chevé Cave, which will produce a cave system more than 2 kilometers in depth. The integration of the entire system will produce a 2,597 meter deep cave and would represent the deepest cave in the world.
Bottlenose dolphin
The deepest dive ever recorded for a bottlenose dolphin was 300 meters (990 feet). This was accomplished by Tuffy, a dolphin trained by the US Navy.
Nellie, the longest-lived Atlantic bottlenose dolphin in human care, died at age 61 on April 30, 2014. Nellie was born on Feb, 27, 1953 at Marineland.
Vanderford Valley
Vanderford Valley (Other English names: Vanderford Strath, Vanderford Submarine Valley Hungarian "Vanderford-selfvölgy") () is an undersea valley, named in association with the Vanderford Glacier, which reaches a depth of 2287 m (7,503 ft). This may be the deepest glacier-carved valley in the world.
Douglas C. Gordon
In 1998, Gordon participated in an expedition to the Tibetan river Tsangpo (named the Brahmaputra River in its lower course), sponsored by National Geographic. The team of middle-aged paddlers also included the brothers Jamie McEwan (Olympic slalom bronze medalist in 1972) and Tom McEwan (former slalom racer, with first descent experience including the Great Falls of the Potomac), and Roger Zbel. Three of them would use expedition kayaks, one a whitewater canoe. Gordon was the most experienced of the team, but all were considered expert river runners. A ground crew of five completed the expedition. Their plan was to accomplish the first descent of a 140-mile (225 km) section of the Tsangpo, passing the deepest river gorge on earth, the more than 4877 meter (16,000 ft) deep gorge between 7782-meter Namjagbarwa Feng and 7194-meter Gyala Peri. The paddlers had planned up to six weeks for the descent.
Actun Box Ch'iich'
At -183m, Actun Box Ch'iich' (Cave of the Black Birds) is the deepest cave in the country of Belize. Located above Roaring Creek in the Cayo District, it is one of several caves explored and documented by British and Canadian cavers during a three-week expedition in 1989. The cave contains a small stream and has both an upper and lower entrance, making a through-trip possible.
History of underwater diving
The "Tritonia" suit was upgraded into the first JIM suit, completed in November 1971. This suit underwent trials aboard "HMS Reclaim" in early 1972, and in 1976, the JIM suit set a record for the longest working dive below , lasting five hours and 59 minutes at a depth of .
Leszek Czarnecki
Getting his licence at the age of 22, in the early 1980s, Leszek Czarnecki was one of the youngest diving instructors in Poland. In 1986, his passion for cave diving led him to set up his first commercial diving company —Przedsiębiorstwo Techniki Alpinistyczno-Nurkowej TAN S.A. In 1986–1990, he worked as a professional diver (with heavy diving equipment for underwater works). Diving is still his passion. He holds two – Polish and world – records. In September 2003, he beat the Polish record diving to 194 m in Boesmansgat cave in South Africa. The decompression lasted 4 hours and 48 minutes, at a water temperature of 16 °C. He was assisted by Nuno Gomes who holds two deep sea diving records – in the open sea he dived to 318.25 metres, and in caves – to 283 metres. In Mexico, Leszek Czarnecki beat the world record in the longest distance covered in the caverns – 17 km in the system of water-filled caves Dos Ojos on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. In 2006, he took part in a North Pole expedition, and in a Bikini Atoll expedition to explore the wrecks. In 2007, he went on a trip across Siberian wilderness with diving in Lake Baikal, in 2008 – he went to Antarctica, and in 2010 – explored wrecks in the Truck Lagoon in Micronesia (where he dived several times), and in Galapagos.
J. Val Klump
Jeffrey Val Klump is an American limnologist. He was the first person to reach the deepest spot in Lake Superior, a depth of 1333 feet (733 feet below sea level), the second lowest point in the United States after Iliamna Lake, on July 30, 1985 while aboard the R/V Seward Johnson with the Johnson Sea Link-II submersible. Klump was also the first person to reach to the deepest point in Lake Michigan as part of the same expedition. He is currently a professor and dean at the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Ayo Akinwolere
Blue Peter presenter Ayo Akinwolere has set two world records for swimming in one of the deepest stretches of water on the planet. Mr Akinwolere swam five miles across the Palau Trench, an 8,000-metre deep abyss in the Pacific Ocean. He is the first person to swim across the deepest part of the trench, and now holds the record for the deepest location for an open water swim. He took three and a half hours to complete his swim. His records were verified by the World Open Water Swimming Association. Until a few weeks before, Mr Akinwolere was unable to swim a length and was terrified of open water.
He said: "It's an absolute triumph to have completed this swim, after having had just over 10 weeks of swimming training I still cannot believe how far I've come.
"I could not swim a length before this and now I have swum over one of the deepest parts of the world.
"All the hours of gruelling training will be worth it if my challenge inspires more children from ethnic minorities to learn to swim."
McCann Rescue Chamber
In 1939, the McCann Rescue Chamber made its debut when it was used to successfully rescue thirty-three survivors from "Squalus", At the time of "Squalus" accident, Lieutenant Commander Momsen was serving as head of the Experimental Diving Unit at the Washington Navy Yard. The submarine rescue ship USS "Falcon" (ASR-2), commanded by Lieutenant George A. Sharp, was on site within twenty-four hours. It lowered the Rescue Chamber — a revised version of a diving bell invented by Momsen — and, in four dives over the next 13 hours, recovered all 33 survivors in the first deep submarine rescue ever. McCann was in charge of Chamber operations, Momsen commanding the divers. Although there was no reason to believe anyone was alive in the aft part of the ship, a fifth dive was made to the aft torpedo room hatch on May 25. This run confirmed the flooding of the entire aft portion of the ship.
SS Flying Enterprise
Later Leigh Bishop worked with US divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler to film the wreck for a 2005 episode of the History Channel's "Deep Sea Detectives". This became the deepest wreck dived of the 56 episodes made.
Katie Melua
On 2 October 2006, Melua entered the "Guinness Book of Records" for playing the deepest underwater concert 303 metres below sea level on the Norwegian Statoil's Troll A platform in the North Sea. Melua and her band underwent extensive medical tests and survival training in Norway before flying by helicopter to the rig.
Melua later described achieving the record as "the most surreal gig I have ever done". Melua's concert is commemorated in the DVD release "Concert Under the Sea", released in June 2007.
Artur Kozłowski (speleologist)
Artur (Conrad) Kozłowski (17 October 1977 – 5 September 2011) was a Polish cave diver who spent his last years in Ireland. Amongst other achievements in cave exploration, he holds the record for the deepest cave dive in Great Britain and Ireland at a depth of .
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.
USS Nero (AC-17)
"Nero" recommissioned on 10 April and sailed five days later for the Hawaiian Islands for deep sea soundings, then steamed via Guam to the Philippines arriving Cavite on 4 August. There she coaled various naval vessels until sailing on 9 September for Yokohama to continue deep sea sounding. The collier got under way for the west coast on 24 September, stopping at Guam and Honolulu and arriving Mare Island on 15 February 1900. During this voyage she took a sounding in the area of the Challenger Deep, recording a depth of 5269 fathoms (9,636 m, 31,614 ft), the greatest depth recorded at that time. She decommissioned on 20 May.
Georgia (country)
The Krubera Cave is the deepest known cave in the world. It is located in the Arabika Massif of the Gagra Range, in Abkhazia. In 2001, a Russian–Ukrainian team had set the world depth record for a cave at . In 2004, the penetrated depth was increased on each of three expeditions, when a Ukrainian team crossed the mark for the first time in the history of speleology. In October 2005, an unexplored part was found by the CAVEX team, further increasing the known depth of the cave. This expedition confirmed the known depth of the cave at .
Alexey Molchanov
Alexey Molchanov is the deepest man in the history of the competitive freediving. He achieved his first world record in 2008 in a pool discipline called Dynamic Apnea, in which he swam 250m underwater with a monofin on one breath. Since then he focused on the depth discipline and began to compete in the open ocean.
Kaikō ROV
Among the many discoveries of the "Challenger" expedition was the identification of the Challenger Deep. This depression, located at the southern end of the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands group, is the deepest surveyed point of the World Ocean. The "Challenger" scientists made the first recordings of its depth on 23 March 1875 at station 225. The reported depth was 4,475 fathoms (8184 meters) based on two separate soundings.
DeepFlight Challenger
It was planned that Branson would pilot the sub to the Puerto Rico Trench, while Chris Welsh would pilot it for the Mariana Trench dive. Virgin Oceanic had hoped to be the first team to solo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and first team to return to the Challenger Deep since the Bathyscaphe Trieste, the first submersible to dive to the Challenger Deep, left, however, James Cameron's Deepsea Challenge project beat them to it in March 2012. There has been an undeclared race on to return to the Challenger Deep between four teams, Cameron's, Virgin Oceanic's, Google-Schmidt/DOER's, and Triton Submarines'. The attempt on Challenger Deep had been announced in April 2011.
Richard Stanton (cave diver)
In 2004 Stanton and Volanthen set a world record for greatest depth achieved in a British cave, cave diving at Wookey Hole in Somerset.
In 2010 Stanton, Volanthen, Jason Mallinson, and René Houben set a world record for longest cave penetration dive, obtaining in the Pozo Azul cave system in the Rudrón Valley in Spain.