‘Titanic’ director dives to Pacific’s deepest point
“Titanic” director James Cameron has safely returned to the ocean
surface after a solo submarine dive to the deepest part of the Pacific
Ocean, expedition organizers said Monday.
“Jim Cameron has surfaced! Congrats to him on his historic solo dive
to the ocean’s deepest point,” said a Twitter message from Deep Sea
Challenge, which organized the dive.
Cameron is the first person to make a solo dive to the Pacific Ocean
valley known as the Challenger Deep, southwest of Guam. And the last
dive of any kind there was a relatively brief two-person team back in
1960.
After a faster-than-expected, roughly 70-minute ascent, Cameron’s
sub, bobbing in the open ocean, was spotted by helicopter and was
expected to soon be plucked from the Pacific by a research ship’s crane,
organizers said.
Mission partner the National Geographic said Cameron had reached a
depth of 35,756 feet (10,898 meters) at 7:52 am Monday (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. Pressure increases with
depth.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 in an
email.
AFP |