For three decades, filmmaker James Cameron has vividly drawn alien worlds. On Monday, ocean explorer Cameron visited one: the bottom of the sea.
Nine hours after completing a historic solo dive to the deepest slice of the ocean floor, Cameron described his “very surreal day” in the language of an astronaut.
“When I came down, landed, it was very, very soft, almost gelatinous, a flat plain, almost featureless plain, and it just went out of sight as far as I could see,” Cameron said from the mega-yacht Octopus, owned by his friend, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
“It was very lunar, a very desolate place, very isolated,” he said. “My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity. I felt like I had literally, in the space of one day, gone to another planet and come back.”
As he piloted the futuristic mini-submarine that he helped to design across the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, at a depth of 35,576 feet, Cameron searched for life.
“We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he said. There weren’t. He saw no fish, either. He found “nothing larger than about an inch across” — shrimplike scavenger creatures called amphipods.
Cameron described extremes of pressure and temperature like those experienced by space travelers. He had to abandon plans to grab extensive samples for scientists on the quest, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and watchmaker Rolex — the intense pressure disabled the craft’s hydraulic arms.
