One Explorer’s Memorable High At The Ocean’s Darkest Depth

Unique vessel capable of traveling seven miles begins drop to Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench.

There’s a lot of debate about the expression, “may you live in interesting times.” Where did it come from? Is it a wish or a curse? Whatever the back story, it’s safe to say 2021 was, to put it politely, interesting in the extreme. But, for one inventor-computer scientist-video game developer-explorer from New York, there may never be another year as amazing as the one he’s just had.

While most of the world was fending off COVID-19 and living on Zoom, and while environmentalists were gearing up to talk about climate, carbon, biodiversity, marine ecosystems, and oceans at COP26, Michael Dubno was immersed in a mission to visit the deepest part of the ocean, Challenger Deep, the Mariana Trench. It’s named after the HMS Challenger whose crew, in 1875, first sounded the depths of the Trench.

“If you were to drain Earth, what gets exposed by 6,000 meters (around 19,000 feet) is basically the entire earth, except for five or six trenches,” says Dubno, still in awe of the experience. “I personally was on the tenth dive to full ocean depth and was the 18th person to go down there.” His exploration plunged to the record depth of 11,000 meters, or roughly 36,000 feet. The U.S. National Ocean Service maps it beneath the western Pacific Ocean in the southern end of the Mariana Trench, which runs several hundred kilometers southwest of the U.S. territorial island of Guam.

Inventor-explorer Michael Dubno boards customized submarine to visit the Challenger Deep, Mariana ... [+] Trench deepest ocean depth on the planet.

It is a totally remarkable thing to have done. The almost seven-mile descent, in a uniquely designed capsule, from sunny warm ocean surface to dark frigid bottom took four hours. Once there, unique translucent life forms were visible amid the talc-like soft sand of the Trench bottom. 

Also on the deep deep floor of the Trench, reminders of the human world. There was a discarded seven-mile long cable, thought to have been left by a team of explorers from China, as well as evidence of microplastics. The unique submersible vessel was shepherded into creation by explorer-retired Naval Officer-private equity investor Victor Vescovo, who took home from one dive a photo of a plastic bag sitting tens of thousands of feet down.

Plastic bag rests on the ocean floor, tens of thousands of feet below the surface.

It was Vescovo who, in early March, 2021, took Dubno and his close friend, astronaut and video game multimillionaire Richard Garriott on separate dives to the Challenger Deep. All three are members of the ultra-elite century-old Explorers Club, an institution bursting with some of the wealthiest geeks in the world.

For Dubno, the obvious access-granting wealth of this exploration is not the heart of the story. What is center stage, he believes, are the profound truths of life on planet Earth and the future of oceans. “What you learn about the ocean and deep ocean exploration is that, even in the most hostile – and it really is quite hostile – part of the ocean, life thrives. And then you learn the other things: man’s influence is felt everywhere and so that’s profound. Life everywhere: profound. The fact that we are screwing up everything – we don’t even know how we’re screwing it up: profound.”

Around the world there is a heightened appreciation of the fragile state of oceans. The United Nations has declared this “The Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.” And as Dubno has found, to visit the ocean at a depth most humans never see is a life-changing experience. 

Dominik Wermus is a former U.S. Navy Submarine Officer, now working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.  “During the day, sailing on the surface, without fail we were always escorted by dolphins or porpoises. At night, the boat is wrapped in beautiful bioluminescent algae lit up by the ship’s wake. Still,” says Wermus, “as a submariner you are thoroughly trained in the ocean environment and the rate of acceleration of change is disturbing. Temperature, salinity, and acidity are changing dramatically. Ocean-dwelling creatures are shifting far from their normal habitats. And the entire ocean is congested with cargo ship traffic.” The pollution, he says, especially in the Pacific, is mind-blowing.

At Stanford University, Andrew Lau-Seim recalls the thrill of underwater travel on fast attack submarines. Now associate director of engineering for Energy Operations at Stanford, Lau-Seim is fascinated by discoveries associated with the deep. He’s also concerned. “I worry about the damage we are doing to the ocean, through climate change and pollution, to the ecosystems, and the many communities around the world that depend upon them.”

Among Dubno’s many post-exploration contemplations, why has deep ocean exploration been so slow to catch on? “We want to colonize space, but we actually don’t know enough about how our own world works,” says Dubno. “We don’t know enough about all the organisms it takes for the ecosystems of earth to actually run.” 

Lincoln Bleavans leads sustainability at Stanford University and sees ocean exploration versus space exploration as a big-picture challenge. “Until the last half-second of the 24-hour timeline of human history, space has been perfect in its visibility, wonder, and unattainability. The oceans, on the other hand, have been accessible but associated as much with death as with food (life!) While space is even more eager to kill us,” says Bleavans, “we still don’t see it that way.”

Dubno says what he has gained is “a brand-new perspective – what you think about life. There’s life everywhere that we don’t know a lot about. There’s pollution everywhere.” It’s all a bit humbling. “When you look into the heavens and you realize that  - we’re basically ants on a very small grain of sand, somewhere in an enormous galaxy, which is in an even bigger universe.”