Filmmaker James Cameron Breaks Own Submarine Dive Record

Filmmaker James Cameron Breaks Own Submarine Dive Record

Filmmaker James Cameron has broken his own record with the world's deepest solo submarine dive, plunging 5.1 miles (8.2 kilometers) in the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea.

But that's nothing. Later this month he says he plans to descend to the deepest place on Earth.

Cameron is planning to plunge to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, 200 miles southwest of Guam. The trench is 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) deep which was only explored by humans only once before when a two-man U.S. Navy team went for just 20 minutes in 1960.

The maker of blockbuster movies "Avatar" and "Titanic" announced he wasn't frightened when he dove that deep in a practice run Wednesday that lasted 3.5 hours on the bottom.

"Certainly not nervous or scared during the dive," he told The Associated Press in a ship-to-shore phone interview. "You tend to be a little apprehensive ahead of the dive about what could go wrong. When you are actually on the dive you have to trust the engineering was done right."

Cameron is using a one-man, 12-ton lime green submarine that he helped design called “Deepsea Challenger.” He is a member of the National Geographic Society, where he is an explorer-in-residence.

"The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet, with scientific riches enough to fill a hundred years of exploration," Cameron said in an earlier statement.

The filmmaker, who has been an interested in oceanography since childhood, has made 72 deep-sea submersible dives, including 33 to the Titanic, the subject of his 1997 blockbuster.

Posted by Kade Quinn on Saturday March 10 2012, 4:19 AM EST. Ref: CNN. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Entertainment, Featured News. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0