Word: dived
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More than a year after USAir Flight 427 plunged from the sky near Pittsburgh, killing all 132 people aboard, the National Tranportation Safety Board will stage tests that might explain what triggered the 6,000-ft. nose dive, TIME's Jerry Hannifin reports. (The first test was schedule for today at the FAA's Flight Technical Center near Atlantic City, but was delayed because of bad weather.) Hannifin says the NTSB, under considerable pressure to solve the mystery behind the worst air disaster since 1987, is exploring an aeronautical phenomenon called wake vortex. Under a long-suspected scenario, the Boeing...
Getting there, though, will force explorers to cope with an environment just as perilous as outer space. Unaided, humans can't dive much more than 10 ft. down--less than one three-thousandth of the way to the very bottom--before increasing pressure starts to build up painfully on the inner ear, sinuses and lungs. Frigid subsurface water rapidly sucks away body heat. And even the most leathery of lungs can't hold a breath for more than two or three minutes...
...learn that at least some of these submerged geysers--whose hot, sulfurous environs bear more than a passing resemblance to hell--are actually bursting with life. Nobody had invited biologists along to study the vents because nobody imagined there would be anything to interest them. But on a dive off the Galapagos in 1977, researchers found the water around a vent teeming with bacteria and surrounded for dozens of feet in all directions with peculiar, 8-in.-long tube-shaped worms, clams the size of dinner plates, mussels and at least one specimen of a strange pink-skinned, blue-eyed...
...wake of Trieste's successful dive, the number of submersibles expanded dramatically. The American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's workhorse, the three-person Alvin (still in operation), was launched in 1964. And the first robots-on-a-tether--the so-called remotely operated vehicles, or ROVS--were developed several years later. The Soviet Union, France and Japan began building their own submersibles, either for military or scientific reasons, and for the first time scientists could systematically collect animals, plants, rocks and water samples rather than study whatever they could dredge up in collection baskets lowered from the surface...
Unlike the French and some Americans, though, the Japanese feel a need to go all the way to the deepest reaches of the ocean. A case in point was Kaiko's dive to the bottopm of the Challenger Deep. JAMSTEC engineers watched anxiously on a video screen, the robotic craft spent 35 min. at a depth of 35,798 ft.--2 ft. shy of Trieste's 1960 record. But during that brief visit, Kaiko saw a sea slug, a worm and a shrimp, proof that even the most inhospitable place on earth is home to a variety of creatures. Next...