Jacques Piccard

So deep it makes curious explorers worldwide wonder, can anything live there?

The first ones to take the plunge are oceanographers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960.

And they get in this thing called a bathysphere that descends underwater.

These guys get down to the bottom.

On the 23rd of January 1960, two men climbed into a steel sphere and sank to the bottom of Challenger Deep.

They were Jacques Piccard, a Swiss oceanographer and engineer whose father, Auguste Piccard, had designed the vessel they were riding in, and Don Walsh, a lieutenant in the United States Navy who'd been assigned to the project as part of the Navy's Deep Submergence Programme.

The vessel was called the Trieste and it was not a submarine.

A submarine is a vessel that moves through the water under its own power, capable of navigating horizontally, diving, surfacing and manoeuvring.

The spike has been found in amphipods from the deepest trenches on Earth, confirming that organic material from the surface, carrying the isotopic signature of Cold War nuclear testing, has reached the most remote ecosystem on the planet and been incorporated into the bodies of its inhabitants.

The deepest place on Earth already carries a human fingerprint, written in radioactive carbon.

You are lying on the floor of Challenger Deep now, on the pale diatomaceous ooze that Jacques Piccard described more than sixty years ago.

A sediment so fine and so soft that if you pressed your hand into it, the impression would remain for years.