James Cameron Planning A Second Trip To The Mariana Trench

Considering how hazardous it is to travel to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, one might have thought that James Cameron’s recent historic trip to the lowest known location on Earth would be the last for some time.

Apparently not. Just a few short weeks after Cameron’s voyage to the bottom of the sea, the famed filmmaker and his team are already gearing up for another trip to the Mariana Trench.

“You can’t over-interpret from one single glimpse,” Cameron told National Geographic News last Wednesday. “What I wasn’t able to do is get very far up the north slope. I was looking for a fault scarp, and I wasn’t able to find one before I ran out of bottom.”

The project, called DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, aims to return to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench at some point within the next year, and the next trip to the lowest point on Earth will possibly be longer than the first–which lasted about 3 hours.

“We always planned it in two gos,” Cameron told National Geographic. “The first [phase] primarily focused on proving and refining the technology, [with] the second one being more science-focused once we had a proven platform.”

Cameron and his deep-diving team took the submersible used to carry Cameron and his team to the Challenger Deep for a relatively shallow dive on Saturday. The filmmaker his crew took the Deepsea Challenger to a depth of 3,600 feet just a bit off the coast of the small island of Ulithi, part of Micronesia.

Source: National Geographic