July 27, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

China sub makes its first dive to below 5,000m

LONDON, July 27, Graphic News: A Chinese submersible conducted the country's deepest manned dive Tuesday, surpassing current U.S. capabilities and setting a milestone in the race to explore potentially vast mineral resources in the deepest parts of the world's oceans. 

Jiaolong, a 7.9 metre-long (26ft) submersible named after a mythical water dragon, succeeded in diving to 5,057 metres (16,591ft) in the Pacific Ocean to the south east of Hawaii.

Now, the craft's three crew members, Tang Jialing, Fu Wentao and Ye Cong, plan to dive the titanium-hulled craft to 7,000m (22,966ft) below sea level. The only submersible to have gone deeper was the Trieste bathyscaphe in 1960, when Jacques Piccard (who co-designed the Trieste along with his father, Auguste Piccard) and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh set the current record of 10,916m (35,814ft), in a plunge to the bottom of Challenger Deep -- the deepest known point on earth.

The Jiaolong has been developed under the Chinese government's 863 programme, which also helped to build the Shenzhou spacecraft, making China just the third nation to conduct manned space flight.

The sub gives the Chinese government the ability to explore for vast deposits of minerals -- including gold, copper, zinc, and rare-earths -- on the sea bed. While many major land deposits have been exhausted by the $225 billion-a-year mining industry, the world's oceans, which cover more than two-thirds of the earth's surface to an average depth of 4,000m (13,123ft), offer a bonanza of deposits.

China has already signed a deal with the regulatory International Seabed Authority to map an area of 7.8 million hectares (30,000 sq miles) of the Pacific. Last week, the ISA issued permits to China and Russia to explore the manganese-rich Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone in the eastern central Pacific.

Russia has two Finnish-built Mir submersibles with a maximum dive capability of 6,000m (19,685ft), which were used by Hollywood director James Cameron to film the wreck of the Titanic. France has the Nautile, another Titanic veteran, also capable of diving to 6,000m. Nautile was recently used to recover the black box of Air France flight 447. America's aging Alvin can dive to a depth of 4,500m (14,700ft).

The Jiaolong's range theoretically gives China access to nearly all of the world's deep-sea areas, and has made China only the fifth country to go deeper than the 3,500m (11,400ft) mark.
/ENDS