Hamish Harding on his journey to the Earth’s deepest point and back

How did you decide to go ahead with this expedition?

I am an aviation professional based in Dubai for the past 13 years. My company Action Aviation deals in buying and selling business jets. Although I have always been fascinated with how people would make it to the Guinness World Records, I got mine a year and a half ago for fastest circumnavigation of the earth via both poles in a Gulfstream 650ER business jet. I have always wanted to venture into uncharted territories. That got me interested in embarking on adventures and explorations, in general. I like going to extreme locations and this one — Challenger Deep — is the deepest point on Earth, and is an extremely hostile environment. To travel to parts of the Challenger Deep, where no human had ever been before, was truly remarkable. To discover both a potential new species and unmapped territory so far below sea level and to set two new Guinness World Records is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. I hope it will also inspire others to push the boundaries of what is possible. Being in the UAE has given me the opportunity and encouragement to undertake this challenging feat as I have been inspired by its spirit of “everything is possible” .

Why was this a challenging expedition?

This particular adventure of touching down and traversing the Mariana Trench was something that became possible only very recently because the technology wasn’t there earlier. The first submersible was a US Navy vessel called Trieste that descended to the ocean floor in 1960, where it spent just 20 minutes before ascending . The vessel was so badly damaged that it could never be used again. The second attempt was made by Hollywood director James Cameron in 2012, but his craft was also unable to be used again.

And so the Triton submersible, that my co-pilot Victor Vescovo and I used, is now the only one that can undertake repeat trips to full ocean depth and traverse the bottom for significant periods of time. The $35 million sub has been designed by Victor. It is a titanium pressure vessel, which has a 90mm of titanium sphere in the middle and acrylic surfaces all around. It has been used by Victor to go down to the lowest points of the five oceans around the world, making him the only one to have done this so far. The deepest part is Challenger Deep and I wanted to be a part of this expedition with Victor.

How did the journey shape up?

It was a 10-day mission as me and my 13-year-old son Giles flew from Dubai straight to a tiny island in the Western Pacific called Guam in a private jet. From Guam, we took a mothership — DSSV Pressure Drop — along with our submersible, which is crewed with 35 people. From here on, we headed to the Mariana Trench towards the location, which is the deepest point known to mankind called the Challenger Deep — 11km under the surface of the ocean.

There was a lot of briefing that was given to us about the system, procedures and what to do in case things don’t go as planned. A lot of the external parts of the sub could be jettisoned. There were chances of getting entangled in cables down in the trench that have come from the remote-operated vehicles by different countries. So there was a possibility that our thrusters could get entangled with such objects but we had made all arrangements in case of emergencies. Also, launching and recovering the sub is the most difficult part of the mission as we are at the mercy of the ocean — that too a rough one. But the moment you leave the surface, things get calmer and the sub just sinks.

We managed to reach the bottom in four hours at a speed of descending a metre per second — a comfortable descent rate. Once down, the craft can move itself as it is manoeuvrable. We stayed at the bottom and traversed 4.5 miles across the trench for another four hours before coming back to the surface. So we completed our round trip in around 12 hours.

What were the challenges you faced in this expedition?

Apart from checking the systems, weather and other things before taking the plunge, we also had to start dehydrating ourselves just so we did not have to use the rest room in those 12-13 hours we’d be down under tonnes of water. I began preparing myself by almost stopping food and water for 12 hours before the dive, which, of course, was not without its dramatic moments. As we geared up to start the dive, we learnt that out of the 10 thrusters of the two-person submersible, one malfunctioned. There was a discussion on delaying the dive, but we were told to fix the thruster. In fixing it, there could have been more damage to the sub and this might have put the whole mission in jeopardy.

We then took a decision to just go down with nine thrusters and not 10. And we took the plunge.

We began at 3.28am on March 5 and managed to reach the bottom of the trench in four hours. On touching down, we discovered that the Challenger Deep’s floor was not flat as previously thought. After our descent, we began our traverse across the trench but during this record-breaking traverse of 4,634 metres, the submersible was forced to ascend around 800 metres to clear an unmapped mountainous plateau the approximate height of the Burj Khalifa, with a shape resembling South Africa’s Table Mountain. This undersea mountain is yet to be named.

At the bottom of the trench, we were under 100,000 tonnes of pressure at full ocean depth — 1,200 times more than the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. To put this level of force into perspective, it would be equivalent of 8,000 double-decker buses or 300 jumbo jets on top of a human.

Everything in the sub is battery-operated. Therefore, we were completely dependent on them and luckily things fell into place and we even managed to have batteries left when we came up. We worked out a better way of using the batteries by using less power on the actual thrusters with much lower settings that helped us use 50 per cent less power than usual.

saman@khaleejtimes.com