James Cameron has taken another giant leap for mankind in his quest to go from “king of the world” to king of the deep.
This weekend the director returned from a record-breaking solo trip to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep—the planet’s deepest ocean area. Cameron descended to the 6.8 mile deep undersea valley in a 2.5 story-tall “vertical torpedo” submarine and spent hours moving along the trench’s seafloor and cliff walls, utilizing a robotic arm and “slurp gun” to collect sediment and small sea creatures for study.
The haul from Cameron’s trip included scientific data, specimens, and a 3-D recording of his adventure, and may signal a renaissance in deep-sea study. A full report on the findings will be released in National Geographic magazine. We’re pretty sure he didn’t find any blue people down there, but here’s hoping the new footage boasts a better plot than his last opus.
Video produced by Jim Festante