HOW UNFAIR to travel to the deepest place on the planet and not be met by a sea monster. All filmmaker James Cameron encountered as he bottomed out 11km below the Pacific Ocean’s surface was a gang of tiny shrimp-like creatures.
The maker of Titanic, Avatar and Aliens was clearly not out of his depth on this, the second human visit to the Mariana Trench, a deep 2,550km-long gash carved into the seabed. Yet the scene that met him as he touched down at about 10pm Irish time on Sunday could have been modelled on the most bizarre film set imaginable.
“It’s really the sense of isolation more than anything, realising how tiny you are down in this big vast black unknown and unexplored place,” Cameron is reported as saying.
A special place required a special mode of transport to get there, the 12-tonne Deepsea Challenger. Standing seven metres tall, the steel tank descended upright for just over 2½ hours before reaching its destination, the Challenger Deep, at 10,898m as deep as one can get on Earth.
Cameron spent about three hours on the sea floor, about half of the time he had expected to remain there. “I just sat there looking out the window, looking at this barren, desolate lunar plain, appreciating,” he said.
The expedition was a joint undertaking by Cameron, National Geographic and watchmaker Rolex. It also had the scientific backing of the prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
It used a stereoscopic camera to capture the scenery, footage that will be used to make a 3-D feature-length film of the undertaking. The craft itself was also a marvel of engineering to be able to withstand the crushing 1,000 atmospheres of pressure exerted by the ocean at such depths, deeper below the surface than commercial aircraft fly above it.
If the truth be told, however, there wasn’t a great deal of science to be had from such a mission.
Clearly it represents a great human adventure, but it is cheaper – and far safer – to send unmanned roving submersibles if seabed samples are needed.
Scripps oceanographer Lisa Levin probably acknowledged as much when she said the project had the potential to generate huge public interest in deep ocean science.
While Cameron’s journey was the first solo trip to the bottom of the trench, it was not the first. As long ago as 1960, US navy lieutenant Don Walsh and the late Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard spent 20 minutes there in the submersible craft Trieste.
The 57-year-old filmmaker fairly zoomed back to the surface in about 70 minutes, returning to the light at noon local time or Monday 2am Irish time. The trip was a success but not without incident.
The Deepsea Challenger had a hydraulic grab for collecting samples but, even as Cameron extended the arm to retrieve a sample, the seals failed, preventing him from bringing back any souvenirs.
He declared that the adventure was not at an end. “This is the beginning of opening up this new frontier.”
He will have company. Sir Richard Branson has also built a deep water submersible and plans to dive on the Atlantic Ocean’s deepest point, the Puerto Rico Trench, later this year.
