James Cameron headed to ocean's deepest point

Squeezed into a submersible as futuristic as anything in his movies, James Cameron intends to descend solo to the ocean's deepest point within weeks, the Canadian filmmaker and explorer announced Thursday. (See more pictures of Cameron's sub.) Just Tuesday, during testing off Papua New Guinea, Cameron dived deeper than any other human has on a solo mission. Now he aims to become the first human to visit the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep in more than 50 years—and to return with animals, images, and data that were unthinkable in 1960. That year the two-person crew of the U.S. Navy submersible Trieste—still the only humans to have reached Challenger Deep—spent only 20 minutes at the bottom, their view obscured by silt stirred up by the landing (more on the Trieste dive). By contrast, the Cameron-designed DEEPSEA CHALLENGER sub is expected to allow the explorer to spend about six hours on the seafloor. During that time he plans to collect samples and film the whole affair with multiple 3-D, high-definition cameras and an 8-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall) array of LED lights. Already the tech-laden sub has taken Cameron a record-breaking 5.1 miles (8.2 kilometers) straight down. That Tuesday dress rehearsal for Mariana made the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER the deepest-diving submersible in operation and the deepest-diving single-pilot sub in history. Designed to sink strangely—and efficiently—upright, the 24-foot-tall (7-meter-tall) craft was eight years in the making. Among its advances is a specially designed foam that helps allow the new sub to weigh in at 12 metric tons, making it some 12 times lighter than the Trieste. Despite its innovations, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER's spherical steel cockpit just barely accommodates its single occupant—in this case, Cameron, the man behind Avatar, Titanic, The Terminator, and, fittingly, The Abyss. Nothing in his fictional worlds could quite prepare him for real-life exploration, said Cameron, a veteran of dozens of deep-sea submersible dives. "When you're making a movie, everybody's read the script and they know what's going to happen next," said Cameron, also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, in a video statement. (The Society owns National Geographic News.) "When you're on an expedition, nature hasn't read the script, the ocean hasn't read the script, and no one knows what's going to happen next." (Video: James Cameron's Mariana Trench Mission.) Mariana Trench Still a Mystery Cameron and his team will head for the Mariana Trench only after completing more tests—this time off the U.S. island territory of Guam (map), about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of Challenger Deep. The dive will be part of Cameron's DEEPSEA CHALLENGE project, a partnership with National Geographic and Rolex that will take him and a crew of engineers, scientists, and filmmakers to the deepest ocean regions on Earth. Cameron, 57, said he hopes the project will help answer some surprisingly basic scientific questions about ocean trenches, such as whether fish can live in the sea's deepest reaches. (Despite a claimed sighting by a Trieste crewmember, the presence of fish in Challenger Deep is very much an open question. So far no robotic mission has spotted fish there.) "We're gonna go down there with our cameras, our lights, and find the answers to some of those questions," Cameron said. Cameron Under Pressure The Mariana Trench is something of a 1,500-mile-long (2,550-kilometer-long) scar in the Pacific seafloor. (See pictures of the Mariana Trench region.) At Challenger Deep, the trench plummets 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) down—if Mount Everest were dropped here, its summit would be more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) underwater. Because of its extreme depth, the trench is perhaps the most inhumane place on Earth: cloaked in perpetual darkness, chilled to near freezing. At the bottom, Cameron's craft will be subjected to water pressures approaching 16,000 pounds per square inch (11,250,000 kilograms per square meter). "It would be about the equivalent of turning the Eiffel Tower upside down and resting it on your big toe," DEEPSEA CHALLENGE team member Patricia Fryer told National Geographic News. Fryer is a geologist at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics & Planetology (HIGP). The sub will actually shrink by about 2.5 inches (6.3 centimeters) during the descent. Expedition leader Cameron said, "Every single fastener, every single way of joining structures on the sub had to be looked at very carefully, because otherwise stainless steel bolts would just shear as the sub compressed." Cameron's "Clown Car" Cameron isn't the only person dreaming of reaching the ocean's deepest point. U.K. magnate Richard Branson has built a two-seater sub resembling a stubby-winged airplane, which he says can survive a Challenger Deep descent. Also, the Triton "luxury" submersible company last year unveiled the Triton 36000/3 model, which would reportedly allow a three-person crew to make the journey. Of the current-day contenders, though, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER looks as though it'll be first to the bottom—and of course first to return. Once Cameron flips a switch, an electromagnetic system is to jettison the heavy steel plates that allow the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER to sink—sending the sub surfaceward like a cork. The team estimates Cameron will be able to complete the descent in an hour and a half. The ascent should take about the same amount of time—a far cry from the Trieste's five-hour descent and three-hour-plus ascent. The trip, though, won't be a comfortable one for Cameron. In the 43-inch-wide (109-centimeter-wide) steel "pilot sphere," the explorer won't be able to extend his arms or legs. And he'll have to share that scant space with snacks, a camera, joysticks, and a change of warmer clothing (more on what Cameron will experience). "It's like a clown car in there," Cameron said. "You barely have room to get in, and then they hand you another 50 pounds [23 kilograms] of equipment." (See inside the pilot sphere.) "Totally Alien" Animals Await? During the expected six-hour sea-bottom sojourn, Cameron will be able to use the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER's 12 propeller-driven thrusters to move up and down and side to side and to hover in place. With a folding robotic arm, he'll be able to collect rocks, animals, and seafloor core samples for later study on the surface. (Related: "Life Is Found Thriving at Ocean's Deepest Point.") Before Cameron's dive, the team also plans to send unmanned "landers" to the trench bottom. Resembling skinny phone booths, the 13-foot-tall (4-meter-tall), camera-equipped submersibles will carry bait to lure sea creatures into plastic cylinders, which can be retrieved by the team when the landers surface. "The animals on the inside are captured" and even after ascent, "still cold, still under pressure," Kevin Hardy, senior development engineer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and a member of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE team, told National Geographic. Hardy predicts some of the specimens will be "totally alien" to scientists. "If you can imagine a wild animal, you'll find it down there." Already, "science fiction is mimicking what we see for real in the deep ocean," he added. "And we haven't seen it all yet. There's a 'continent' we haven't explored down there."