James Cameron emerges from the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

[Suezy]

Cameron emerges from the deep
8:45 AM Tuesday Mar 27, 2012 

Filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron. Photo / AP
In James Cameron's fantasy films, like Avatar and The Abyss, the unexplored is splashed in colour and fraught with alien danger. The reality he just explored, the deepest part of Earth's oceans, appears more bland, white and barren.

And yet it is also alien and amazing.

There's something oddly dark and compelling about the first snippets of video that Cameron shot of the Marianas Trench. It's not what you see but where it puts you: Nearly 11 kilometres below the ocean surface. There is a sense of aloneness in the wordless video showing his sub gliding across what he called "the very soft, almost gelatinous flat plain."

"My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity," Cameron said Monday, shortly after returning from the strange, dark place reached just once before, by a pair of explorers. "I felt like I literally, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and come back. It's been a very surreal day."

Cameron is the only person to dive there solo, using a sub he helped design. He is the first person to reach that depth since it was initially explored in 1960


It may not have looked dramatic, and in a way Cameron was "doing exploration with training wheels," but it was an amazing start, said Andy Bowen, who heads the deep submergence lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "They do lack the visual impact of highly colorised 3D spectacular representations of the ocean," but Bowen said he'll take it, and there are still "dramatic discoveries to be made."

The video snippet, released by trip sponsor National Geographic, is just a coming attraction. Cameron will keep diving there in the western Pacific Ocean, where the depth of the trench is called Challenger Deep. And he's already filming it in 3D, for viewing later.

To Cameron, the main thing was to treasure where he was and the experience. He didn't do that when he first dove to the watery grave of the Titanic, and Apollo astronauts have said they never had time to savour where they were.

"There had to be a moment where I just stopped, and took it in, and said, 'This is where I am; I'm at the bottom of the ocean, the deepest place on Earth. What does that mean?'" Cameron told reporters during a Monday conference call.

"I just sat there looking out the window, looking at this barren, desolate lunar plain, appreciating," Cameron said.

He also realized how alone he was.

"It's really the sense of isolation, more than anything, realizing how tiny you are down in this big vast black unknown and unexplored place," Cameron said.

There had been a race to the bottom among rich and famous adventurers. Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Industries fame has been building his own one-man sub to explore the depths of the ocean. Branson told The Associated Press on Monday that Cameron's dive was "a fantastic achievement."

Branson said he hoped to explore a different deep place first now. He plans later this year to dive to the deepest part of the Atlantic, the Puerto Rican trench. That area is almost 9.6 kilometres deep and has not been explored.

Branson said he hopes to take his one-man sub and join Cameron in a tandem dive of solo subs: "Together, we'll make a formidable team."

Cameron spent more than three hours at the bottom of the ocean, longer than the 20 minutes Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard spent in the only other visit 52 years ago. But his time there was shorter than the six hours he had hoped for, and he didn't reach the trench walls, because he was running low on battery power. He said he would return, as would the sub's Australian co-designer, Ron Allum.

"I see this as the beginning," Cameron said. "It's not a one-time deal and then moving on. This is the beginning of opening up this new frontier."

He spent time filming the Mariana Trench, which is about 321 kilometres southwest of the Pacific island of Guam. The trip down to the deepest point took two hours and 36 minutes, starting Sunday afternoon U.S. East Coast time.

His return aboard his 12-ton, lime-green sub called Deepsea Challenger was a "faster-than-expected 70-minute ascent," according to National Geographic, which sponsored the expedition. Cameron is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

The only thing that went wrong was the hydraulics on the system to collect rocks and creatures. Just as he was about to collect his first sample, a leak in the hydraulic fluid sprayed into the water and he couldn't bring anything back.

Science like this takes time, but Cameron is committed to doing it, said Woods Hole's Bowen, who ran a program that sent an unmanned sub to the same place in 2009.

"The reality of exploring an environment is at times it can be very boring; exploring these environments isn't always about some dramatic highly visual discovery," Bowen said. "The scientific process is exhausting and sometimes it takes a significant amount of sweat, if you will, to uncover secrets."

And Cameron did sweat - and shiver.

When Cameron climbed into his sub, it was warm because it was near the equator and his cramped vehicle - his head hit one end and his feet the other - was warm because of the heat given off by electronics. It felt "like a sauna," he said.

But as he plunged into the deep, the temperature outside the sub dropped to just above freezing, he said.

The pressure on the sub was immense - comparable to three SUVs resting on a toe. The super-strong sub shrank 7.6 centimetres under that pressure, Cameron said.

"It's a very weird environment," Cameron said. "I can't say it's very comfortable. And you can't stretch out.
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