James Cameron, self-proclaimed “king of the world,” went to the bottom of it yesterday. The Titanic director and deep-sea explorer dove to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess, the Mariana Trench, using a submarine of his own design. He announced the triumph in a tweet, sent while he was almost seven miles deep, to the puzzlement of dozens of Twitter users who struggle to get a signal in an elevator or in their own apartments:
How do you tweet from the bottom of the ocean? The secret turns out not to be a killer service plan (“C-Mobile” as one Twitter user joked), but having a friend up on the surface. As a spokesperson for the National Geographic Society informed me, “the tweet was pre-written by James Cameron and sent by a team member from the surface ship, with his knowledge, when he arrived at the bottom.”
For those willing to count tweets by proxy, Cameron thus claimed the world’s deepest tweet. (Of course the usual claim is that Twitter is too shallow.) That said, Cameron’s feat may not be the most impressive and bewildering we’ve seen yet. As SlashGear pointed out, NASA astronaut and Expedition 25 commander Douglas H. Wheelock was able to check in to Foursquare upon docking at the International Space Station.
