Oceans' salvation may lie in exploration

Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard wave after surfacing from their dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the worlds deepest spot. The mission, in 1960, was the first--and only--manned dive to the bottom of the trench. Now, ocean exploration has fallen off the map, but new technologies promise to recharge a once promising field of research.(Credit: Thomas Abercrombie, National Geographic Society)
On January 23, 1960, two men, diving in a small deep-sea submersible, reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a spot about 200 miles southwest of Guam that, at 35,800 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, is the deepest point on Earth.
It was the first time humans had gone that deep, and when Navy Lt. Don Walsh and his co-pilot, Jacques Piccard, took the bathyscaphe Trieste all the way down, they surely must have felt like pioneers, the first of many who would make their way there.

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