The US scientist on being the first Black woman to descend to Earth’s deepest point, ignoring career advice – and what really happened to the Titan submersible

The American oceanographer Dawn Wright is the first Black person and only the 27th human to have been to the deepest spot on the planet. Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, is 10.9km (6.8 miles) below sea level – deeper than Mount Everest (8.8km [5.5 miles]) is tall. Wright’s summer 2022 descent is documented in a new book, Mapping the Deep, written with her input. The dive was undertaken in a two-person submersible called Limiting Factor owned (since sold) by Caladan Oceanic, an ocean expedition company founded by investor turned deep sea explorer Victor Vescovo, who was also the craft’s pilot. Wright, 63, who also goes by the moniker “Deepsea Dawn”, is the chief scientist of Esri, a multinational that makes geographic information system (GIS) software for mapping and spatial analytics.

Sending people to the deep ocean can be dangerous because of the extreme underwater pressure. Last year, OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded on a journey to view the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five passengers on board. Why not just leave it to robots?
Most of the exploration in the ocean is done by robots – it’s just more efficient, especially for mapping. But occasionally, it is important for a human to go down. It can be the way to get the best understanding of how a particular part of the Earth is working or solve a scientific mystery. In the case of Challenger Deep it is an iconic place and we had a scientific mission.