“The Deepsea Challenge” – Rolex Just Made the Deepest Dive Watch

Web Desk — The Deepsea Challenge – Rolex new release which has been described as a “watch that defies the limits” is now available for Rolex enthusiasts. The watch is designed to be able to function up to 11,000 meters—almost 7 miles—underwater.

Rolex’s $12,950 Deepsea Sea-Dweller was already rated at 3,900 meters in 1988. This is the limit that vastly outstrips the possibilities for human survival (the deepest-ever ocean outing for a saturation diver).

With a diameter of 50 millimeters, ‘The Deepsea Challenge’ is necessarily huge, something that made the experimental watch taken down by James Cameron unwearable due to the weight of the stainless steel involved.

This new watch is made from Grade 5 titanium – the same metal used in aeronautical engineering, which boasts extreme lightness coupled with the strength of steel, as well as high corrosion and temperature resistance—factors. It makes the Deepsea Challenge, at 251 grams, 30 percent lighter than the experimental prototype.

The watch is like the greatest hits of Rolex dive-watch tech. These are annotated extensively around the face elements of the watch. This includes Rolex’s patented Ringlock system, a reinforced structural element of nitrogen-alloyed steel within the watch’s architecture that ensures the watch keeps its form under extreme pressure.

The watch also includes one of Rolex’s most famous inventions, the helium escape valve, first introduced in 1967 as a method to release helium gas that can build up inside the case of a watch at extreme depths, and would otherwise blow the crystal off the watch during decompression.

Rolex enthusiasts and the odd hardcore professional diver will love to wear the watch. The Deepsea Challenge is more than anything a reassertion of primacy by the company that—with the invention in 1926 of the Oyster case that it still uses—first defined the concept of a waterproof watch, and has continued to push it to a place where there really is nowhere left to go.