Jiaolong submersible sets record for "China depth"

Edited and translated by Ma Xi, People's Daily Online

At 11:47 a. m. of June 27 (Beijing time), the Jiaolong submersible set the record for "China depth" once again by reaching a depth of 7,062 meters.

For the manned deep sea submergence cause and deep sea scientific cause of China and even the world, the depth of 7,000 meters is an important challenge and also a milestone. That the Jiaolong has successfully exceeded the depth of 7,000 meters is an extremely significant achievement of China's marine science and technology realm and indicates that China has turned into one of a few countries mastering key technologies of the manned deep sea submergence. It is also a new breakthrough and a great progress in the development of the deep sea science and technology and indicates that China's manned sea bed scientific research and resource exploration ability has reached a globally leading level.

"The depth means the width and the width means the working ability. The number of 7,000 meters means not only a depth but also our working ability and deep sea survey and research ability," commented the general designer of the Jiaolong Xu Qinan.

Without question, the manned submersible Jiaolong represents the utmost frontier of the deep sea high-tech realm. It has the largest working depth of 7,000 meters in all manned submersibles of the same kind in the world. It has the hovering and position-getting ability for reaching the working objective. It has such advanced functions as the underwater acoustic communication, seabed micro-topography detection, high-speed video and audio transmission and small sea bed objective detection. It has many high-performance working tools which can guarantee the submersible to complete various complicated tasks, such as the temperature maintaining, pressure maintaining, sampling and core drilling.

"These are the four distinctive capacities of the Jiaolong. The Jiaolong is able to do various jobs, including the deep sea mine detecting, seabed high-precision topographic survey, suspicious object detecting and capturing and deep sea biological survey, and its working range almost covers the entire global ocean area." The 76-year-old general designer of the Jiaolong Xu Qinan, who had been on duty in the land guarantee base for countless days and nights, said that it is an important deep sea technological instrument that has adopted many new high technologies, new materials and new techniques and has independent intellectual property rights.