Titanic director James Cameron safely returned to the ocean surface after a solo submarine dive to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, yesterday.
His goal was to bring back data and specimens from the unexplored territory
It was a “very lunar, very desolate place. Very isolated,” Mr Cameron told reporters in a phone conference. “I felt like I in the space of one day had gone to another planet and come back,” he said.
He described the ocean floor as a 'completely featureless, alien world”.
Mr Cameron is the first person to make a solo dive to the Pacific Ocean valley known as the Challenger Deep, southwest of Guam. The last dive of any kind there was a relatively brief two-person team back in 1960.
After a 70-minute ascent, faster than expected, Mr Cameron’s sub, bobbing in the open ocean, was spotted by helicopter and was soon plucked from the Pacific by a research ship’s crane, organisers said.
Mission partner the National Geographic said Mr Cameron had reached a depth of 10,898 metres at 7.52 a.m. yesterday (2152 GMT Sunday) in the Mariana Trench in his specially designed submersible.
Because of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing, according to members of the team.
The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is a crushing eight tons per square inch − or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Mr Cameron spent several hours on the Pacific Ocean sea floor, collecting samples for scientific research and taking still photographs and moving images.His goal was to bring back data and specimens from the unexplored territory. He is expected to announce the results of the experiment later.
The tools taken by the explorer to the ocean floor 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.
Now the science team is getting ready for the returned samples, expedition astrobiologist Kevin Hand from Nasa said.
Upon touchdown, Mr Cameron’s first target was a phone booth-like unmanned “lander” dropped into the trench hours before his dive. The submersible that Mr Cameron designed, a “vertical torpedo” of sorts, had already successfully completed an unpiloted dive on Friday.
In 1960, a two-person crew aboard the US Navy submersible Trieste − 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.
Retired US Navy Captain Don Walsh, who descended to Challenger Deep in 1960, said he was pleased to hear that Mr Cameron had reached the underwater valley safely.“That was a grand moment, to welcome him to the club,” Mr Walsh said in a statement from the support ship.
Mr Cameron, 57, has been running several miles a day, practising yoga to increase his flexibility for the dive in the sub’s cramped quarters and studying deep-ocean science. Mr Cameron already has 72 dives under his belt, including 12 to film the blockbuster Titanic.