Titanic director shoots new blockbuster in pioneering dive to sea’s deepest spot

 
Dream trip: James Cameron emerges from Deepsea Challenger
Mark Prigg26 March 2012

Film-maker James Cameron has become the first person to travel solo to the deepest place on earth, nearly seven miles below the ocean’s surface.

The director of Titanic and Avatar triumphantly resurfaced after diving 6.8 miles to the bottom of the Mariana trench in the Western Pacific in the Deepsea Challenger, a specially designed "vertical torpedo" submarine with a cockpit only 43 inches wide.

He is believed to have discovered several new species, and in a technological first, he tweeted from the ocean floor, telling followers: "Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you."

Canadian Cameron, 57, spent more than three hours piloting the sub along the trench walls, exploring, collecting samples and shooting video footage.

It was the second of only two manned expeditions to the ocean's deepest point. The first, in 1960, was by a Swiss engineer and a US Navy captain whose craft kicked up so much silt they were unable to observe much.

The trench is 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon and more than a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall. When his work was done, Cameron released weights on the bottom of the 12-ton craft, allowing it to rise to the surface in 70 minutes, 300 miles south-west of Guam. Among the Deepsea Challenger's tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small sea creatures for study, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges.

In keeping with his 3D work on Avatar, the director mounted stereo cameras on the craft. He is now set to travel straight to London for the premiere of Titanic 3D on Wednesday.

"There is scientific value in getting stereo images because you can determine the scale and distance of objects from stereo pairs that you can't from 2D images," he said. He described the expedition as "the fulfilment of a dream", adding: "I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction at a time when people were living a science fiction reality. People were going to the moon, and [diver and ecologist Jacques] Cousteau was exploring the ocean."

Film from the expedition, a partnership between Cameron, the National Geographic Society and Rolex, will be aired on a National Geographic TV programme this year. "The sub's lighting of deepwater scenes - mainly by an 8ft tower of LEDs — is so, so beautiful," said Doug Bartlett, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and chief scientist for the project.

"It's unlike anything that you'll have seen from other subs or other remotely operated vehicles.

Scientists say the experiment should provide a unique insight into life at the bottom of the ocean. Biological oceanographer Lisa Levin, from Scripps, said: "I consider Cameron to be doing for the trenches what Cousteau did for the ocean many decades ago."

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