An Explorer Had Achieved The Deepest Ever Dive When He Made An Alarming Discovery On The Seafloor

Victor Vescovo

Victor Cescovo is an explorer and is also known as a daredevil. He is a Dallas, Texas native and is a scholar. He has studied at Stanford University, MIT, and Harvard Business School. He has made a name for himself as one of the founders of Insight Equity Holdings, where he has invested in defense firms and electronics. His true passion; however, is sea exploration. He has made it his life’s work to go deeper into the ocean than any person in history. In April 2019, he attempted this. The dive took place in the Mariana Trench. Due to this dive, he now holds the record for the world’s deepest descent. He went down 36,000-feet, which is 7,000-feet lower than Mount Everest is high.

Experience In the Sea

Victor is no stranger to the sea. He served in the United States Navy Reserve for over 20 years. After stepping down, he decided to focus on exploration. His exploration was deemed The Five Deeps Expedition. When Victor went down into the water of the Challenger Deep, which is the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. He was going to set eyes on a place that no human being ever had. He spent four hours on the bottom of this unexplored part of the sea floor and saw something that he found incredibly shocking.

Heights

It isn’t just diving deep under the water that Victor enjoys. He also enjoys traveling to the highest mountain peaks in the world. He is one of only a dozen Americans to climb the tallest mountain on every continent. He loves the highs and the lows of our planet.

A Purpose

When Victor dives to the lowest depths of the sea floor, he does hope to see things that no other human ever has. He does hope to make amazing discoveries, but he has another reason to go where no man has gone before. He wants to provide maps of the terrain of the areas that he explores. He also collects samples that will help with research in geology, geography, and biology. The lead scientist on Victor’s mission, Alan Jamieson, often shares the progress on Victor’s mapping. He says that so far, they have mapped out 150,000 square kilometers of the sea floor and they are only halfway done in the area. He says that when the maps are complete and cleaned up, they will be posted online for anyone to use.

Earlier Explorations

Before Victor and his team set out to the Mariana Trench, they had already gone to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in December 2018. In February 2019, Victor touched down on the floor of the Southern Ocean. In April of the same year, he touched down on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. In each of these cases, Victor was the first person to reach these depths.

The Challenger Deep

The Challenger Deep isn’t just the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean; it is also the lowest point on the planet. It is a remote spot that is located in the southern end of the Mariana Trench, located about 178 miles away from dry land. The deepest point of the Challenger Deep is 36,000 feet below the sea level. The pressure at such depths is dangerous. If you were to try swim this deep, your body would be crushed by over 15,000 pounds of water pressure. The water at these depths is about 34 degrees, and it is pitch dark because the sun cannot reach this deep in the ocean. A scuba diver can go only 250-feet underwater before the pressure becomes a problem. This is why a pressurized submersible is the only way to reach these depths. Victor named his submersible, Limiting Factor, after a spaceship in one of his favorite science-fiction novels.

The Descent

On April 26, 2019, they let Limiting Factor loose. It took three and a half hours to get to the ocean floor. When an explorer had achieved the deepest ever dive when he made an alarming discovery on the seafloor. He managed to see species never encountered by humans before. Among them was an amphipod, which is similar to a shrimp. When he reached the ocean floor, he was the first human to reach a point this low at 35,853-feet. When he did, his team on the boat cheered.

Life

When Victor reached the bottom of the sea, he discovered that it was a peaceful, quiet place, but it wasn’t dead. While on the sea floor, he was making his maps and observing, when he saw something that caught his eye. On the deepest part of the planet, he found a piece of garbage floating in the water. It was a piece of plastic, and Victor thought that it was either a bag or a wrapper from a piece of candy. Either way, it was man-made and somehow found its way to the deepest part of the ocean.

Disappointment

When Victor saw the piece of garbage at the bottom of the ocean, he was very disappointed. He says that with over 7 billion people living on the Earth, it is only a matter of time before our oceans are destroyed if we don’t do something now.

Seven in Ten

Some of the amphipods taken from for ocean floor were taken for study. Seven in ten of them had plastic inside them. This means that the piece of plastic that Victor saw on the ocean floor wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. Researchers from around the world have reported finding rubber, glass metal, under the sea. This just shows how seriously we are damaging our planet for future generations.