JAMES CAMERON : To The Deepest Point of Ocean-Mariana Trench

      Filmmaker and ocean enthusiast James Cameron became the first solo explorer to reach the deepest point of the ocean — almost seven miles down,when his custom-built one-man submarine touched down in the western Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench at 7:52 a.m. local time Monday (5:52 p.m. Eastern time Sunday).

His depth on arrival: 35,756 feet (10,898 meters)—a figure unattainable anywhere else in the ocean.

The trip is the first attempt by humans to reach the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, since two Navy lieutenants touched bottom in January 1960. On that trip, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard spent just 20 minutes on the bottom inside the bathysphere Trieste, the only humans before Cameron to visit the spot. The sub kicked up so much silt that the pair saw virtually nothing outside their porthole.

Cameron’s dive was expected to last about eight hours. According to plan, the innovative “vertical torpedo” — A lime-green submersible called Deepsea Challenger that Cameron helped design — was to plummet nearly 36,000 feet in just over 90 minutes, the swiftest deep dive with a human pilot. At the end of the dive, Cameron was to release 1,100 pounds of metal ballast, sending the vehicle shooting to the surface. 

High-tech “syntactic foam” that forms the core of the vehicle was designed to be compressed by the immense pressures, while a metal sphere less than four feet across kept Cameron safe. The sphere is pressurized, so he was not at risk for decompression sickness. 

An unmanned test dive Friday proved the sub worthy of surviving the crushing pressures of nearly eight tons per square inch — like an elephant standing on your toe.

 Folded into a sub cockpit as cramped as any Apollo capsule, the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker is now investigating a seascape more alien to humans than the moon. Cameron is only the third person to reach this Pacific Ocean valley southwest of Guam (map)—and the only one to do so solo.

Cameron returned to the surface of the Pacific on Monday morning, said Stephanie Montgomery of the National Geographic Society.

His return was a "faster-than-expected 70-minute ascent", according to National Geographic.

Redundant safety systems were designed to detach the sphere and send it toward the surface if problems arose. There was enough oxygen on board for 56 hours. And if the sub got stuck in bottom muck, ocean saltwater would eat through straps holding the sphere inside the vertical torpedo, releasing it in about four days. 

Four high-definition cameras recorded the trip for a television special and a 3-D theatrical film, with an eight-foot-tall bank of high-intensity lights illuminating the depths of the trench, which lies far beyond the reach of sunlight. The Mariana Trench is a gash formed where one of the Earth’s huge tectonic plates, the Pacific plate, plunges under another, the Mariana plate.

Besides filming the journey, Cameron aimed to collect rocks, soil and any deep-sea creatures he encountered, using hydraulic arms attached to the sub. Biologists and geologists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NASA will scrutinize the samples for exotic microbes and clues to how the slippage of the two giant tectonic plates can cause earthquakes and tsunamis.

Cameron is a longtime ocean explorer. Besides his films, he produced a documentary in 2003 about the wreck of the Titanic, “Ghosts of the Abyss,” and in 2005 released “Aliens of the Deep.” This was his 73rd trip into the ocean in a submersible, including 33 dives to the Titanic.

DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, then, may be anything but a one-hit wonder. To Bartlett, the Mariana Trench expedition could "Represent a turning point in how we approach ocean science."