Seven years in the making, the descent by one of the most successful Hollywood directors of all time (“Aliens”, “Terminator”, “Titanic”, “Avatar”) was delayed for some 16 hours by choppy seas.
But around 4 a.m. local time (2 p.m. Eastern), seas calmed enough for Cameron to head down. He began the dive by saying, “Release, release, release!” according to the @deepchallenge Twitter account that’s sending out running updates of the adventure.
The National Geographic Society is sponsoring the trip, the first attempt by humans to reach the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, since two U.S. Navy lieutenants touched bottom in January 1960. On that trip, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard spent just 20 minute on the bottom inside the bathyscaphe Trieste. The sub kicked up so much silt that the pair saw virtually nothing outside their porthole.
Cameron’s dive is planned to last about eight hours. If it goes according to plan, the innovative “vertical torpedo” – a lime-green submersible called Deepsea Challenger - will plummet nearly 36,000 feet in just over 90 minutes, the swiftest deep dive with a human pilot. At the end of the dive, Cameron will release 1,100 pounds of metal ballast, sending the vehicle shooting to the surface.
High-tech “syntactic foam” that forms the core of the vehicle will be squeezed by the immense pressures, while a metal sphere less than four feet across will keep Cameron safe. An unmanned test dive on Friday proved the sub worthy of surviving the crushing pressures, according to National Geographic News.
Redundant safety systems can detach the sphere and send it surfaceward if problems arise. If the sub gets stuck underwater, ocean saltwater will eat through straps holding the sphere inside the vertical torpedo, releasing it in four to five days.
Four high-definition cameras are recording the trip, with an eight-foot-tall bank of high-intensity lights illuminating the depths of the trench, which lies far beyond the reach of sunlight. The trench is a gash formed where one of the Earth’s huge tectonic plates, the Pacific plate, plunges under another, the Mariana plate.
Besides filming the journey, Cameron will try to collect rocks, soil, and any deep-sea creatures he encounters, using hydraulic arms attached to the sub.
Cameron, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, is a long-time ocean explorer. Besides his blockbuster films, he produced a documentary about the wreck of the Titanic in 2003, “Ghosts of the Abyss”, and in 2005 released “Aliens of the Deep”, which documented the strange creatures found in the Mid-Ocean Ridge, an underwater mountain range bisecting the Atlantic Ocean.
what a fu**ing g
