Tthe American oceanographer Dawn Wright is the first Black person and only the 27th person to have been to the deepest place on the planet. Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, is 10.9 km (6.8 miles) below sea level – deeper than Mount Everest (8.8 km) [5.5 miles]) is long. Wright’s summer 2022 descent is documented in a new book, Mapping the Deepwritten with her input. The dive was undertaken in a two-person submersible called Limiting Factor owned (since sold) by Caladan Oceanican ocean expedition company founded by an investor turned deep sea explorer Victor Vescovowho was also the vessel’s pilot. Wright, 63, who also goes by the name “Deepsea Dawn”, is the chief scientist of Esri, a multinational that makes geographic information systems (GIS) software for mapping and spatial analysis.
Sending people into the deep sea can be dangerous because of the extreme underwater pressure. Last year, Ocean Gatesay Titan submarine imploded on a journey around the wreckage of the Titanickill everyone five passengers on board. Why not just leave it to robots?
Most of the exploration in the ocean is done by robots – it’s just more efficient, especially for mapping. But once in a while it is important for one to go down. It can be the way to get the best understanding of how a particular part of the earth works or to solve a scientific mystery. In the case of Challenger Deep, it’s an iconic place and we had a scientific mission.
Ocean Gate did not take proper safety precautions. The sub was not certified, and the hull was cylindrical and made of carbon fiber. The sub I went down in has a hull machined to be as close to perfectly spherical as possible – that’s the geometry that protects you from hydrostatic pressure – and it’s made of titanium – the strongest material for the purpose. It is also certified: I would not have gone otherwise.
What was the scientific point of your trip?
Challenger Deep consists of three depressions and my dive was the least visited, Western Pool. We were the first to look up from the ground we covered.
On the engineering side, it was to test a prototype instrument: a portable sidescan sonar specifically designed to withstand pressure and operate at any ocean depth.
Then we undertook multibeam sonar mapping from the support ship to give us a fresh map of the entirety of Challenger Deep and the Mariana Trench. That data was deposited with Seabed 2030a global collaborative effort to completely map the ocean floor by 2030 that Esri is part of.
How was the dive and what did you see?
It was about a 10-hour round trip with two-and-a-half hours at the bottom to observe and test the prototype instrument, which we over an area of several hundred square meters did. The spherical cockpit is a tight space and Victor and I sat with everything we needed within easy reach. There is no toilet, so I had to safely dehydrate before the dive.
At about 1,000 m you enter total darkness. Through the submarine’s portholes we saw bioluminescent jellyfish and worm-like siphonophores, which flashed back at us when Victor flashed the submarine’s lights on them. The first moments of reaching the bottom were discouraging – we saw a beer bottle – but the rest was great. We observed large fields of rock: evidence of the two tectonic plates colliding in that zone (the old, heavy Pacific plate subducting under the Philippine Sea plate). And we saw little creatures like anemones, sea cucumbers and amphipods [a type of crustacean] – everything withstands great pressure and functions in total darkness and cold. Our images and specimens are studied by marine biologists.
Your career includes more than 20 ship-based research expeditions and dive into other submarines. You have also pioneered the application of GIS to seabed and ocean mapping. What got you interested in ocean science?
I grew up in the Hawaiian Islands and I was always at the beach. But I also became fascinated by the geology: living somewhere that started as volcanoes under the sea and then rose up. Combine that with watching Jacques Cousteau on TV and reading ocean adventure books and I made the decision to become an oceanographer at the age of eight.
My first scuba dive was in 1991 in a research vessel called Alvin. This was to make observations of the geology and biology and map the distribution of hydrothermal vents (undersea hot springs) in a segment of the East Pacific Rise, the seafloor spreading zone in the Pacific Ocean. This was one of the first studies to apply GIS to seabed mapping anywhere. You can get lost in a map of the ocean floor.
One of your gripes is that so little of the ocean floor has been mapped in high resolution to date. Is it really it bad?
Yes! Our current collective estimate is that we have mapped 26.1% of the ocean to the modern detail we need. There’s a lot we don’t know about our home, since about 70% of our planet is ocean.
The longer it takes us to map everyone the seabed in detail, the more we play with fire: it is essential for so many things. For example, it gives us a better understanding of ocean volume, which enables climate scientists to build better models of climate change, improves our predictions of how tsunamis will behave and enables the design of protected marine habitats.
Interest is growing deep sea mining. The International Maritime Organization plans to release regulations on the practice next year Norway is pressure forward with the opening of its own waters. Can deep sea mining be done sustainably? Won’t better mapping of the seabed help mining companies pursue exploitation?
The Seabed 2030 data is unlikely to be fine enough for a mining operation. But the project’s data is open: anyone can use it. If mining companies are doing their own mapping of the seabed, my hope is that they will be willing to contribute to Seabed 2030 to speed up ocean mapping and benefit us all.
At this point I don’t think it is possible to do this sustainably. The environmental assessments are not done and many of us do not trust that they will be done properly. I have, in my personal capacity, a statement of marine experts calling for a moratorium while potential impacts on the marine environment are studied. I am concerned that this will greatly harm large areas of the sea floor, which are habitats for all kinds of biota.
What would you like young women of color who want a career in ocean science to know?
That this type of work is for them too! And that there is organizations that support Black marine scientists who weren’t around when I came along. All young people should pursue what they love and not allow others to divert them from that path. I was once told I wasn’t cut out to be an oceanographer: I’m glad I didn’t take that advice.
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Mapping the Deep is published by Esri Press (£19.99). To the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. The book’s companion website, featuring a Lego video illustrating Dawn Wright’s dive, is here
