• Question: what's the deepest you've ever gone in the ocean (in meters)?

    Asked by anon-276208 to Rachel on 12 Jan 2021.
    • Photo: Rachel Brackenridge

      Rachel Brackenridge answered on 12 Jan 2021:

      I send instruments down into the ocean to collect data rather then going myself, which is lucky as I actually have a fear of submarines! So even though I have not been deep into the ocean, by tools have been very deep to collect sediment from the sea bed – up to around 3km deep (that’s the depth of 10 Eiffel Towers!

Comments

  • Photo: Malcolm Wookiee

    Malcolm Wookiee commented on :

    I trained in scuba diving quite a few years ago and went down to 46.4m in a place called Hands Deep, just off the Eddystone lighthouse. I was using a cylinder containing normal air, and quickly suffered from nitrogen narcosis (a fancy name for an attack of the giggles) when at this depth. Giggling underwater is quite difficult and dangerous but you quickly recover when moving up to shallow water. This trip was also the first and only time we saw a basking shark, but I was too slow to get the rest of my diving kit on to jump overboard and swim along side.

  • Photo: Alistair

    Alistair commented on :

    As a diver I’ve been down to 50 metres using air (as apposed to any gas mixes) in the Mediterranean sea. Round the UK only down to about 30m.
    I was lucky enough work with a submersible off the Scottish coast in 1970 from one of the research vessels – Two of the geologists on the team were taken down to about 200 metres at the edge of the ‘continental shelf’

  • Photo: Graham

    Graham commented on :

    I learned to scuba dive years ago but have only been down to about 15 or 20 metres in Thailand and the Canary Islands.

  • Photo: Eleanor

    Eleanor commented on :

    SCUBA diving, I’ve been down to about 40m in California and Hawaii. But like Rachel, I also send sensors down into the deep ocean to make measurements for me. On this current expedition, we installed some sensors at 5300m underwater, and they’ll be down there making measurements until we come back in 1-2 years to pick them up again and download the data.