They exist – and in such numbers as to sustain a micro-industry. Reading between the lines, the ideal Triton client must be a billionaire with a taste for showmanship and aspirations of scientific or exploratory glory. Some are tried and tested, others awaiting a wealthy backer to bring them into existence: a comfortable lounge-type sub appropriate for romantic dinners or intimate weddings a long, sausage-shaped vehicle that could host cocktail parties, even a casino souped-up subs shaped like starfighters, kitted out in camo or clownfish colours. Inside their brochure – cover of textured navy, letters picked out in copper – I find a catalogue of dream machines. To produce their glittering monsters, Triton must find backers, funders, clients. His evangelical zeal for the transcendental possibilities of submersion is contagious. Very few people have ever seen the ocean floor fewer people have explored ocean trenches than have walked on the Moon. Still – depending on where you are in the ocean – you may not yet have made it a tenth of the way down. At 1,000m below the surface, it is already so dark that no living eyes can see pressure is intense, as if 100kg were pushing down on every square centimetre. This was around the limit of early naval submarines too, such as the German U-Boat, although in extremis individual subs were reported to have descended as far as 100m.īy 300m deep, so much sunlight has been absorbed by the sea above that even in the middle of the day it is as dark as a moonlit night. Without intensive training and special equipment, most would become incapacitated by the time they reached 90m below the surface, the depth at which air becomes toxic due to the increased “partial pressure” of oxygen. A scuba diver, for example, must start considering the risk of decompression sickness (“the bends”) when spending extended periods below 10 metres or so from around 30m down they risk the intoxicating effects of nitrogen narcosis. It’s hard for the landlubber to understand the true scale of this achievement. Triton’s 36000/2, a titanium-hulled leviathon, is the only vehicle ever certified to “full ocean depth”, and has explored the very deepest trenches on the planet. After starting out as a saturation diver in the oil and gas industry, he got into subs in the 1980s, first as a pilot and then as a producer, co-founding his company in 2007 – a company that has pushed the very bounds of underwater possibility. Lahey is about as far from a hobbyist as it is possible to get. View image in fullscreen Deep-sea explorer: Triton’s 1000-2 MKI Antarctica.
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