James Cameron back on surface after deepest ocean dive
James
Cameron: "It's a heck of a ride, you're just screaming down and screaming backup"
Hollywood director James Cameron has
returned to the surface after plunging nearly 11km (seven miles) down to the
deepest place in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.
He made the solo descent in a
submarine called Deepsea Challenger, taking over two hours to reach the bottom.
He spent more than four hours
exploring the ocean floor, before a speedy ascent back to the surface.
His craft was kitted out with
cameras so he could film the deep in 3D.
"It was absolutely the most
remote, isolated place on the planet," Mr Cameron told BBC News.
"I really feel like in one day
I've been to another planet and come back."
This is only the second manned
expedition to the ocean's deepest depths - the first took place in 1960 when US
Navy Lt Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard spent about 20
minutes on the ocean floor in a bathyscaphe called the Trieste.
Lt Walsh, who is now in his 80s,
joined Mr Cameron and his team of engineers out at sea for the dive.
"It did bring back a lot of
memories, just being out there and remembering what we did there," he told
BBC News. "It was really grand."
Director James Cameron resurfaced
after spending four hours on the ocean floor
Mr Cameron has spent the past few
years working in secret with his team of engineers to design and build the
craft, which weighs 11 tonnes and is more than 7m (23ft) long.
He describes it as a "vertical
torpedo" that slices through the water allowing him a speedy descent.
The extraordinary attention to
detail prevented him from suffering from too much nervousness.
"I can't say that I wasn't
apprehensive in the last few days and even the weeks leading up to this, but
there's another part of my mind that really understands the engineering and
knows why we did everything the way we did," he said.
"Any apprehension I had I left
at the hatch. When I went into the sub, I was all pilot at that point."
The tiny compartment that the
film-maker sits in is made from thick steel, which is able to resist the 1,000
atmospheres of pressure he experienced at full ocean depth.
The rest of the vertical column is
made from a material called syntactic foam - a solid made mostly of hollow
"microballoons" - giving it enough buoyancy to float back up.
The sub has so many lights and
cameras that it is like an underwater TV studio - with Mr Cameron able to
direct and film the action from within. He intends to release a documentary.
It also has robotic arms, allowing
him to collect samples of rocks and soils, and a team of researchers are
working alongside the director to identify any new species. He says that
science is key to his mission.
But the first task was to get to the
inky depths - which despite untold hours of training, still surprised Mr
Cameron.
"My reference frame was going
to the Titanic 10 or 12 years ago, and thinking that was the deepest place I
could ever imagine," he recalled.
"On this dive I blazed past
Titanic depth at 12,000 ft and was only a third of the way down, and the
numbers keep going up and up and up on the depth gauge.
"You just kind of look at them
with a sense of disbelief, and you wonder if the bottom is ever going to be
there."
At the bottom, Mr Cameron
encountered incredibly fine silt, which he had to be careful not to disturb. He
said he spotted a few small, as-yet unidentified life forms but found the
depths to be a "sterile, almost desert-like place".
Before
the dive, James Cameron told the BBC's Rebecca Morelle why he was risking it
all
While manned exploration had until
now seen a 52-year hiatus, scientists have used two robotic unmanned vehicles
to explore the Mariana Trench: Japan's Kaiko made a dive there in 1995 and the
US-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's vessel Nereus explored the deep
in 2008.
Other teams, such as Scotland's
Oceanlab, have also been dropping simple landers loaded with bait and cameras
into the deepest ocean.
While places like the Mariana Trench
were once thought to be of little interest, there has been a recent resurgence
of scientific interest in the deep.
Scientists are finding life that can
resist the colossal pressures, from deep-sea fish to shrimp-like scavengers
called amphipods, some of which can reach 30cm (1ft) long.
They are also trying to understand
the role that deep seas trenches play in earthquakes - these cracks in the sea
floor are formed at the boundary of two tectonic plates and some believe the
push and pull taking place deep underwater could be the cause of major
earthquakes, such as the 2011 quake that resulted in such devastation in Japan.
But some scientists question whether
manned exploration provides the best platform for scientific research.
Dr Alan Jamieson, from Oceanlab,
said: "I think what James Cameron has done is a really good achievement in
terms of human endeavour and technology.
"But my feeling is that manned
submersibles like this are limited in scientific capabilities when compared to
other systems, mostly due to the fact there is someone in it. Remote or
autonomous systems can collect a far greater volume of useful scientific data
for far less money."
Engineer
David Wotherspoon explains how Deepsea Challenger works
Mr Cameron says he does not want
this dive to the deep to be a one-off, and wants to use it as a platform for
ocean exploration.
His craft may also soon be joined by
other manned submersibles vying to reach the ocean's deepest depths.
One of these crafts, the DeepFlight
Challenger, belongs to former real estate investor Chris Welsh, and is backed
by Virgin's Richard Branson. It is about to begin its water trials.
Its design is based on a plane, and
Mr Welsh says he will be "flying" down to the deepest ocean.
Google's Eric Schmidt has helped to
finance another sub being built by a US marine technology company called Doer
Marine. They want this sub to carry two to three people, and are placing a
heavy emphasis on science.
And Triton submarines, a
Florida-based submersible company, intends to build a sub with a giant glass
sphere at its centrepiece to take tourists down to the deepest ocean for
$250,000 a ticket.
