Sphere −1 (or of the Oceans)

In 1953, the same year that Everest was conquered, Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques made a record dive with the bathyscaphe Trieste to a depth of −3150 mt. in the sea off the coast of Ponza, an Italian island off Naples. A few years later, in 1958, the first nuclear-powered submarine of the US Navy, Nautilus, made its way to the arctic, reached the North Pole and surfaced off Greenland. Thus began the era of ocean exploration from within, or from below, rather than from above. Then, two years later, in 1960 (the same year Triton completed its submerged circumnavigation of the globe), the Trieste, with Jacques Piccard again on board, and with US naval support, reached a depth of 10,916 mt.: the deepest point of all the Earth oceans, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It is just one more courageous example of what it means to explore: this time it is the depths of the ocean and its floor, which no one then had yet seen; and even now, those few who have seen it have only seen a small part.