''Titanic'' director James Cameron returned to the surface yesterday
after a solo submarine dive to the deepest point in the world's oceans
that was hailed as the ultimate test of "man and his machine."
Cameron
plunged about seven miles (11 kilometres) to the bottom of the Mariana
Trench in the western Pacific, where temperatures are barely above
freezing and the pressure is a crushing thousand times that at sea
level.
Speaking after the mission, the filmmaker-explorer
described a barren "completely alien world" on the ocean floor, not
unlike the surface of the moon.
It was a "very lunar, very desolate place. Very isolated," Cameron said.
"I
felt like I, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and
come back," he said, describing the ocean floor as a "completely
featureless, alien world."
The acclaimed film director described
the experience of hurtling down the "yawning chasm" of the ocean:
"Falling through darkness -- that's something that a robot can't
describe."
The voyage was the first manned expedition to the
trench in more than half a century and Cameron said it was the
culmination of more than seven years of planning.
"Most
importantly, though, is the significance of pushing the boundaries of
where humans can go, what they can see and how they can interpret it,"
he said in a statement.
The journey down to the Challenger Deep
valley of the Mariana Trench, which lies southwest of Guam, took two
hours and 36 minutes, organizers said.
He told reporters in a
phone press conference that he was at the bottom of the ocean for about
a little more than two and a half hours, and had to cut short the
planned stay of six hours because of problems with the ocean craft's
hydraulics system.
Cameron said that being able to make the
journey was "the culmination from my perspective of a lifelong dream,"
and that he hopes to be able to continue to marry his love of exploring
the depths of the sea with his work as a director.
He collected
samples for research in marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology,
marine geology and geophysics, and captured photographs and 3D moving
images.
Cameron is the first person to make a solo dive to the
Pacific Ocean trench. The last dive of any kind there was made by a
two-man team in a relatively brief expedition back in 1960.
After
a faster-than-expected, roughly 70-minute ascent, Cameron's sub,
bobbing in the open ocean, was spotted by helicopter and plucked from
the Pacific by a research ship's crane, organizers said.
Expedition physician Joe MacInnis called Cameron's descent "the ultimate test of a man and his machine."
Mission
partner the National Geographic said Cameron had reached a depth of
35,756 feet (10,898 meters) at 7:52am yesterday (2152 GMT Sunday) in
his specially designed submersible the Deepsea Challenger.
Because
of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual
darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing.
The
water pressure at the bottom is a crushing eight tons per square inch
-- or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea
level.
The images collected by Cameron will be used to make a 3-D
feature film, which is expected to be broadcast on the National
Geographic Channel.
Cameron's tools included a sediment
sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small sea
creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and
pressure gauges.
The submersible that Cameron designed -- a
"vertical torpedo" of sorts -- had already successfully completed an
unpiloted dive on Friday.
In 1960, a two-man crew aboard the US
Navy submersible Trieste -- then the only humans to have reached
Challenger Deep -- spent just 20 minutes on the bottom, but their view
was obscured by silt stirred up when they landed.
Cameron, 57,
had been running several miles a day, practicing yoga to increase his
flexibility for the dive in the sub's cramped quarters and studying
deep-ocean science.
Cameron already has 72 dives under his belt, including 12 to film the blockbuster "Titanic."
The
Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped scar in the Earth's crust, measures
more than 1,500 miles (2,550 kilometres) long and 43 miles (69
kilometres) wide on average.