National Geographic and Rolex congratulate James Cameron and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE team on a successful and historic expedition to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
With this achievement, Cameron becomes the first person to make a solo dive to the deepest place on Earth. The endeavor was one of scientific discovery in a new age of exploration, and its success will give us a better understanding of this least explored environment and the secrets and lessons it holds.
Breaking: James Cameron Completes Record-Breaking Mariana Trench Dive
Ker Than
Published 10:02 p.m. ET, March 25, 2012
After
a faster-than-expected 70-minute ascent, James Cameron's "vertical torpedo" sub exploded up through the surface of the western Pacific minutes ago, carrying the
National Geographic explorer and filmmaker back from the
Mariana Trench's
Challenger Deep—Earth's deepest, and perhaps most alien, realm.
The first human to reach the 6.8-mile-deep (11-kilometer-deep) undersea valley solo, Cameron arrived at the bottom with the tech to collect scientific data, specimens, and visions unthinkable in 1960, when
the only other manned Challenger Deep dive took place, according to members of the National Geographic expedition.
Before surfacing about 300 miles (500 kilometers) southwest of Guam—where an expedition ship's crane plucked his sub from the sea—Cameron spent hours hovering over Challenger Deep's desert-like seafloor and gliding along its cliff walls, the whole time collecting samples and video.
Among the 2.5-story-tall DEEPSEA CHALLENGER sub's tools are 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. (See
pictures of Cameron's sub.)
Science in Three Dimensions
Throughout the Mariana Trench dive, 3-D video cameras were kept whirring, and not just for the benefit of future audiences of planned documentaries.
"There is scientific value in getting stereo images because ... you can determine the scale and distance of objects from stereo pairs that you can't from 2-D images," Cameron told National Geographic News before the dive.
But "
it's not just the video. The sub's lighting of deepwater scenes—mainly by an 8-foot (2.5-meter) tower of LEDs—is "
so, so beautiful," said
Doug Bartlett, a marine biologist at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.
"It's unlike anything that you'll have seen from other subs or other remotely operated vehicles," said Bartlett, chief scientist for the
DEEPSEA CHALLENGE project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)
Medical, Psychological Rigors
As the 57-year-old explorer emerged from the sub's coffin—tight 43-inch-wide (109-centimeter-wide) cockpit, a medical team stood at the ready.
But if recent test dives—including one to more than five miles (eight kilometers meters) down—are any indication, Cameron should be physically fine, despite having been unable to extend his arms and legs for hours, expedition physician Joe MacInnis told National Geographic News before the dive.
"Jim is going to be a little bit stiff and sore from the cramped position, but he's in really good shape for his age, so I don't expect any problems at all," said MacInnis, a long-time Cameron friend.
In addition, the sub's "pilot sphere" has a handlebar, which Cameron could use to pull himself occasionally up during the dive. "Usually, shifting position is all that's required to buy yourself another few hours," he said.
Because Cameron had prepared extensively for the dive, he should be psychologically fine as well, said Walter Sipes, an aeronautics psychologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
"He's got prior experience doing this, not just in the simulator but also training dives ... and he's an adventurer, so I really don't think they'll have any issues to worry about," said Sipes, who is not part of the expedition.
Still, if Cameron plans to conduct more dives—which the team has indicated he will—Sipes recommends he get plenty of rest in-between or risk mental fatigue.
"When you start to get fatigued, you start making mistakes," he added. "And since he's down there solo, he can't afford that. He's a [potential] single-point failure."
It should be at least a few weeks before any further DEEPSEA CHALLENGE dives, as the director's next breakneck mission will take him from the middle of the Pacific to London, where he's due at a premiere of his Titanic 3-D Wednesday.
"A Turning Point"
By returning humans to the so-called
hadal zone—the ocean's deepest level, below 20,000 feet (6,000 meters)—the Challenger Deep expedition may represent a renaissance in deep-sea exploration.
While remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are much less expensive than manned subs, "
the critical thing is to be able to take the human mind down into that environment," expedition member
Patricia Fryer said, "
to be able to turn your head and look around to see what the relationships are between organisms in a community and to see how they're behaving—to turn off all the lights and just sit there and watch and not frighten the animals, so that they behave normally.
"That is almost impossible to do with an ROV," said Fryer, a marine geologist at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics & Planetology.
Andy Bowen, project manager and principal developer of the
Nereus, an ROV that explored Challenger Deep in 2009, said a manned mission also has the potential to inspire public imagination in a way a robot can't.
"It's difficult to anthropomorphize machines in a way that engages everyone's imagination—not in the same way that having boots on the ground, so to speak, can do," said Bowen, who's not an expedition member.
Biological oceanographer Lisa Levin, also at Scripps, said that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE program's potential for generating public interest in deep-ocean science is as important as any new species Cameron might have discovered.
"I consider Cameron to be doing for the trenches what Jacques Cousteau did for the ocean many decades ago," said Levin, who's part of the team but did not participate in the seagoing expedition.
At a time of fast-shrinking funds for undersea research, "what scientists need is the public support to be able to continue exploration and research of the deep ocean," Levin said.
For his part, Cameron seems sure that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER will be exploring the depths for a long time to come. In fact, he's so confident in his star vehicle, he started mulling sequels even before today's trench dive.
"And phase three might be taking this vehicle and creating a second-generation vehicle."
DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, then, may be anything but a one-hit wonder. To expedition chief scientistBartlett, the Mariana Trench dive could "represent a turning point in how we approach ocean science.
"I absolutely think that what you're seeing is the start of a program, not just one grand expedition."
Rachael Jackson of National Geographic Channels International contributed reporting to this story.
