James Cameron is not only a ridiculously successful director, he’s also an extremely accomplished deep sea submersible diver, having made over 33 trips to the wreck of the Titanic, as well as another 40 trips to the bottom of the ocean in other parts of the world.
More recently he’s been planning a trip to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean and a place that only two people have ever been, when Swiss engineer, Jacques Piccard, and US navy captain, Don Walsh, went their down there for 20 minutes in 1960.
Nobody has been there in the last 42 years, except that now James Cameron has! He took his sub, Deepsea Challenger, nearly seven miles down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench – which is about 200 miles south-west of the Pacific island of Guam – and spent time exploring there as part of a National Geographic expedition early on Monday morning.
The trench is a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall as well as around 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon, and the water pressure is so great that if Cameron’s sub sprang even the tiniest leak it would instantly explode, with the pressure being the equivalent of having several cars sitting on your toes. Thankfully though, Deepsea Challenger made it through the dive in one piece, allowing Cameron to equal the surprisingly long-standing record and return to the surface safely.
He beat several other teams who are also planning trips into the trench in the next few months.
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