Hollywood icon James Cameron has completed his journey to Earth’s deepest point.
The director of Titanic, Avatar and other films used a specially designed submarine to dive nearly 11km. He spent time exploring and filming the Mariana Trench, about 320km southwest of the Pacific island of Guam, according to members of the National Geographic expedition.
Cameron returned to the surface of the Pacific Ocean on Monday morning local time, according to Stephanie Montgomery of the National Geographic Society.
The scale of the trench is hard to grasp — it’s 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon and more than 1.6km deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
Cameron made the dive aboard his 12 tonne, lime-green sub called Deepsea Challenger.
Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, a US Navy captain, are the only others to reach the spot. They spent about 20 minutes there during their 1960 dive, but couldn’t see much after their sub kicked up sand from the sea floor.
One of the risks of a dive so deep was extreme water pressure. At 10.9km below the surface, the pressure is the equivalent of three SUVs sitting on your toe.
Cameron said in an interview after an 8.2km deep practice run near Papua New Guinea earlier this month that the pressure “is in the back of your mind.”
The submarine would implode in an instant if it leaked, he said.
However, while he was a little apprehensive beforehand, he wasn’t scared or nervous while underwater.
“When you are actually on the dive you have to trust the engineering was done right,” he said.
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