Photos The Vessel
July 29, 2008 -- A Russian mini-submarine dive to the bottom of Lake Baikal on Tuesday failed to set a world record for the deepest dive in fresh water, organizers said, contradicting earlier claims. "There was no record," expedition leader Artur Chilingarov told reporters. "We'll try again." The Mir-1 and Mir-2 submarine pods were supposed to head for the 1,637-meter (5,402 feet) bed of the lake, near Siberia's southern borders with Mongolia and China. The vessels were due to drop at a rate of 30 meters per second to reach the bottom within an hour and a quarter. In the end, the Mir-1 submarine went down only 1,580 meters (5,184 feet) and not 1,680 meters as earlier claimed by the crew. There have not yet been reports of Mir-2's dive attempt. The current record of 1,637 meters was set in Lake Baikal in the 1990s. A crew member and a representative of Guinness World Records in Russia both earlier told journalists that the dive had broken the world record. Lake Baikal is a U.N. world heritage site which contains around a fifth of the world's freshwater reserves. There are suggestions that it might be even deeper than previously thought. Intense water pressure means that previous expeditions have never gone below a quarter of its presumed depth. Chilingarov's deputy Anatoly Sagalevich said the lake has "perhaps not been properly studied" given past measurements had to rely on pure mathematics alone. The submarines are equipped with three special windows located at the front of the craft and a series of video and stills cameras attached to the pods. Sagalevich had expected the mission to uncover previously unidentified species. The expedition leader, Chilingarov, is a pro-Kremlin member of parliament who led a team of scientists that planted a Russian flag at the bottom of the North Pole in August last year. Related Links: |
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