Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it — total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet's weight bearing down on a single postage stamp

Nearly seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a place so hostile that only a handful of human beings in all of history have ever seen it — total darkness, near-freezing water, and pressure equivalent to a jet's weight bearing down on a single postage stamp

Somewhere on the way down, a window cracked. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh were sealed inside a bathyscaphe called Trieste on 23 January 1960, hours into a descent that Britannica records at 10,916 metres, when the plexiglass on the outer hull gave way. They carried on down anyway, sat there briefly, and came back up. Nobody followed them for 52 years, until James Cameron piloted a lime green submersible to 10,898 metres by himself and set the r…