Deep
sea submarine pioneer dies
Swiss-based
marine explorer and inventor Jacques Piccard, who was part of the deepest
submarine dive in history, has died at his home aged 86.
In 1960, Piccard
and US co-pilot Don Walsh took a submersible developed by his father to the
bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.
They went 11km
(seven miles) beneath the surface of the sea.
Their discovery
of living organisms at that depth led to a ban on the dumping of nuclear waste
in ocean trenches.
"By far the
most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole,"
Piccard said afterwards.
"We were
astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."
'Relishing the
unknown'
News of
Piccard's death was announced in a message carried by the website of his son,
the balloonist Bertrand Piccard.
"One of the
last great explorers of the 20th Century, a true Captain Nemo who went deeper
than any other man, Jacques Piccard passed away on Saturday... at his home on
the edge of his beloved Lake Geneva," it said, referring to the hero
created by French writer Jules Verne in his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
The Sea.
Bertrand Piccard
added:
"He passed
on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common
assumptions, a belief in free will and confidence in the face of the
unknown."
Jacques Piccard
was born in Brussels, son of balloonist Auguste Piccard. He studied in
Switzerland, where he settled.
After the Mariana
Trench dive, he worked for the US space agency NASA, exploring deep seas, and
built four mid-depth submarines, including the first tourist submarine which he
used to take passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva.
Story
from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7704551.stm