James Cameron, the director of Titanic and many other box-office hits, recently took a three-hour trip to the deepest point on Earth, called the Challenger Deep. Its in the Mariana Trench and is located at a depth of 35,576 feet. With this, Cameron has become the second person to have gone to this depth and the first to have gone solo and spent so much time there.
James Cameron has a passion for deep-sea diving. In fact, Titanic, the movie that brought him immense fame and success, was also a result of this very passion. And in shooting Titanic, he took thirty-three deep sea dives to the wreckage of Titanic.
And this very passion led him to explore the dark, cold and unknown depths of the ocean this time – a place where only two other persons, fifty years ago, were able to go and no one since! A special submarine was designed for the purpose and Cameron helped with its design. After all, an ordinary piece of hardware couldn’t have fended off the 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at such depths. ‘The whole sub actually squeezes down almost three inches in length just because of the pressure’ Cameron told.
After the dive, he said, ‘It was a very lunar, very desolate place, very isolated. My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity. I felt as though literally in the space of one day, I’ve gone to another planet and come back.’
The time it took him to reach the lowest point was two hours and 36 minutes. Cameron then spent three hours in the place, exploring it and ‘taking it in.’ This is indeed a marvelous and extra-ordinary feat which can open up a whole new world for oceanographers as well as biologists. Here’s the video from Cameron’s trip to the bottom off the ocean:
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