Plumb The Depths

Humanity has only reached the deepest known point on Earth twice, and as Melainne Chiew finds out, Rolex was there to accompany the intrepid explorers every step of the way.

- Melainne Chiew

Space may be home to various alien realms, each one weird and fantastic, but an equally wondrous world lies beneath our oceans’ surfaces. The scenes depicted in the recent Aquaman film may be fictional, but they aren’t far from reality; pressure, salinity and myriad other factors have made the oceans’ depths unique systems unto themselves and extremely hostile to those who aren’t adapted to them.

Despite so, humanity’s penchant for exploration knows no bounds. In 1960, an expedition was made to reach Challenger Deep, the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the deepest known point on Earth. The Swiss-designed and Italian-built bathyscaphe Trieste accomplished the feat with its two-man crew, diving 10,916m below sea level to reach it. Strapped to its hull was the Rolex Deep Sea Special experimental watch, which entered the pitch-dark abyss and surfaced with neither a timing nor reliability issue.