Monday, March 26, 2012

James Cameron Went to The Club By leaps And low

James Cameron Went to The Club By leaps And low: When Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh visited the Challenger Deep 52 years ago, they reported that there was not much to see. Muddy bottom of a muddy diatom, and the type of flounder at the foot long that sunk out of sight when the big yellow submarine, Trieste, came. The presence of fish at a depth of about seven miles (35 840 feet to be exact, a mile higher than Mount Everest in height) was unexpected, because calcium-rich bones that form the skeleton of most vertebrates are chemically unstable at a pressure of the death of eight tons per square inch.

Now, someone came, at last, though, as what he saw there, we're still waiting to hear. Directed by James Cameron participated in the development of underwater man Deepsea Challenger and took him down to the valley form a slot of the submarine, the deepest point in a large crescent-shaped Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.

It is fair to say that the victory was a surprise. After months of secrecy and zero PR, the announcement of the existence of the project, Cameron beat several adventurers the rich and the team of scientists to go where only two people have been before.

Cameron came out of the waves, earlier today at his place in the very exclusive club indeed. About 3,000 climbers to the summit of Mount Everest, nearly 550 people took place in the cosmos, and 12 people walked on the moon. But only three people have visited the deepest point on the ocean floor. At the same time he takes the set of his (very good) science fiction movie "The Abyss". The equivalent may have been Stanley Kubrick goes to Jupiter.

We did "The history of Trieste, when I was in school, and it was in ancient history at the time. It seemed incredible that no one has returned since, even now. Because the abyss can be black and cold, but it is extremely interesting in scientific terms. There is not given in the extreme surface of the Earth. Pressure of about seven miles of thousands of atmospheres, more than 10 times greater than even that on the surface of Venus. The body of the submarine would be crushed like conventional aluminum foil so that both Cameron and his predecessors have been placed in a spherical pressure vessels with thick walls a few inches hard.

James Cameron submersible built in Australia was a bit smaller and thinner than in Trieste, but the principle is the same. Low housing pressure (in the case of only four feet Deepsea Challenger in diameter) enclosed in a separate enclosure. Designers used the trick of Trieste fill the shell with regular gasoline. Gasoline is less dense than water, but as incompressible and can not be contined to the lungs, thin-walled tank.

To descend, lead weights were attached to the hull, which gives negative buoyancy of the vessel. To set the weights were dropped on the floor and Trieste just surfaced. Cameron used instead of gasoline column "syntax" in the foam density, and probably looks like once again to the descent of the shot.

In fact, the technology to get to the bottom has not changed in five decades, but Cameron is packed with high-tech submersible goodies, such as 3D-camera, the bank bright light, and he even managed to send a Tweet from the bottom of the ocean. More raids are expected, and it is likely that Cameron Seven Mile Low Club will soon begin to be a bit cramped.

Graham Hawkes, a British engineer, puts the finishing touches on your Challenger DeepFlight which, in contrast to Trieste and Deepsea Challenger (they should think about a new topic to refer to these machines) has a propulsion system of the active (ie, screw), and "fly" down (and hopefully back), using what is effectively an inverted airplane wing is designed to work underwater. The submarine must be led by none other than Sir Richard Branson and his friend, Chris Welsh.

So what's the point going so far? Indeed, in contrast to (eventually) the moon, there's no way people are ever to create a colony on the sea bottom and the depth excludes any form of commercial exploitation, such as oil.

There is a pure science to begin with. Mariana Trench, as well as other large trench on a bed, said one of the major fault lines, where the linear tectonic plates of Earth are facing. These plate boundaries can be seen as the engine room of our planet's geology, where the unimaginable power in the depths of the world make their presence felt on the surface during the construction periods and continents, and oceans in the formation of short-term earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

What is this world is a mystery. Expedition Trieste saw some fish and worms. Along with the pressure, it is difficult to understand how an animal lives large and complex as the fish are to be viable. Very cold water from above the freezing point of all - there is no light and, therefore, is not any kind of plant life. That supports the base of the food chain? Presumably all life here on earth to make a living on decaying organic matter that rains from the top. Whale carcasses, for example, is likely to support the entire ecosystem for decades, perhaps even more so that the process of disintegration will occur very slowly.

Some have suggested that sea monsters, real krakens life, there are at these depths. Some sailors say a huge squid-like creatures that are sometimes venture to the surface (according to legend), and sometimes attack ships. Then there is the "Bloop", a low frequency and high-intensity underwater (you can hear here), which was discovered by U.S. scientists in 1997 near the western coast of South America. The noise was so powerful that if they can be detected at a distance of 5,000 miles, and its frequency profile suggested that at least one scientist, the origin of "organic." Explanations include the world of ice calving undersea earthquake in Antarctica, volcanoes and landslides, or submarine. The explanation involves less obvious is truly gigantic animal patrol a depth of 1000 feet of super-squid, perhaps, something new in science.

I am skeptical about the claims most phantasmagoric, but we can not abandon these reports manually. In the end, coelacanth, a strange, primitive type of fish that has evolved over 400 million years and is believed to have disappeared during the era of the dinosaurs, was alive and well in the Indian Ocean in 1938. Find a live coelacanth was associated with the discovery of a small Stegosaurus clomping through the forests of the Congo. This fish is an animal that has its roots in a time when the largest creatures on Earth were scorpions. And the giant squid (Architeuthis) existed on the border between myth and science until the early 19th century, when the presence of clams more than the boat was finally confirmed.

So many strange things do not go from time to time and the deep ocean is a place where to look. What about the food problem? This low impact energy, solar heat and radiation is completely absent. Along with the rain of nutrients from the upper layers of the sun, geothermal energy is (one of the most surprising discoveries of recent decades, that of all the deep-sea ecosystems are not motivated by the sunlight, but the chemistry of exotic undersea volcanic openings around). So who knows? If Mr Cameron has noticed something unusual there, no doubt, shot on film, and soon we will all share the adventure.

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