Titanic Director James Cameron returned to the surface on Monday after a solo submarine dive to the deepest point in the world's oceans that was hailed as the ultimate test of “man and his machine.”
Mr. Cameron plunged about 11 km to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, where temperatures are barely above freezing.
Speaking after the mission, the filmmaker-explorer described a barren “completely alien world” on the ocean floor, not unlike the surface of the moon.
It was a “very lunar, very desolate place. Very isolated,” said Mr. Cameron.
“I felt like I, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and come back,” he said, describing the ocean floor as a “completely featureless, alien world.”
The director described the experience of hurtling down the “yawning chasm” of the ocean: “Falling through darkness — that's something that a robot can't describe.”
The voyage was the first manned expedition to the trench in more than half a century and Mr. Cameron said it was the culmination of more than seven years of planning.
The journey down to the Challenger Deep valley of the Mariana Trench, which lies southwest of Guam, took two hours and 36 minutes, the organisers said.
He told reporters in a phone press conference that he was at the bottom of the ocean for about a little more than two-and-half hours, and had to cut short the planned stay of six hours because of problems with the ocean craft's hydraulics system.
Mr. Cameron said that being able to make the journey was “the culmination from my perspective of a lifelong dream.”
He collected samples for research in marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics, and captured photographs and 3D moving images.
Mr. Cameron is the first person to make a solo dive to the Pacific Ocean trench.
The last dive of any kind there was made by a two-man team in a relatively brief expedition back in 1960.
