NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, MARK THIESSEN
After directing two films about sunken sea vessels—Titanic and The Abyss—you might think that James Cameron would fear ocean travel. But instead, he took the deepest possible plunge himself. Yesterday (March 25) at around 5 pm EST, Cameron tweeted from the sea floor, “Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good.”
Cameron and his team of engineers worked in secret for years to construct a vessel able to withstand the pressure at the sea’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench at 6.8 miles down. The vessel—which Cameron dubbed a “vertical torpedo” that sits upright to shoot down to the seafloor—can only hold one person, making his dive the first one-man mission to the Trench’s depths.
He planned ...
