The Deepsea Challenger solo dive

James Cameron · 2012 CE · Earth

Take a purpose-built vertical submersible to the bottom of the Challenger Deep and work there.

Historical context

Fifty-two years after Trieste, the deepest place on Earth had been visited once, by two men, for twenty minutes. Cameron spent seven years and his own money building a craft that fell like a stone and could work at the bottom, then dived it alone. He reached 10,908 metres in two hours and thirty-seven minutes and stayed about three hours on a plain he described as lunar.

The voyage, step by step

1. Repairs at Apra Harbor

   March 2012

   In March 2012 the support ship lies at Guam while the submersible is rebuilt after trials in the Solomon Sea.

2. Waiting at Ulithi

   2012 CE

   The two surface vessels shelter in an atoll lagoon west of Guam, waiting for a sea flat enough to launch and, more importantly, to recover.

3. Launch into the Challenger Deep

   26 March 2012

   Before dawn on 26 March 2012 the green submersible is lifted over the side above eleven kilometres of water, with one man folded inside it.

4. Two hours and thirty-seven minutes

   2012 CE

   The craft drops at about five kilometres an hour, spinning slowly, past the last lighted water and into a column of animals that glow.

5. Ten thousand nine hundred and eight metres

   2012 CE

   He touches down on a flat pale plain of ooze, the second crewed craft ever to reach it and the first to arrive alone.

6. Life on the plain

   2012 CE

   The lights pick out small pale amphipods in the sediment, the only obvious animals at the bottom of the world.

7. Seventy minutes back up

   2012 CE

   He drops the steel ballast and the craft rises in seventy minutes, surfacing far from the ship in a calm sea.

Outcome

10,908 metres reached alone on 26 March 2012, and about three hours spent on the deepest floor of any ocean.

James Cameron

Film director who spent seven years building a vertical submersible and flew it alone to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in 2012.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Deepsea Challenger — Wikipedia
• NOAA Ocean Exploration: hydrothermal vent and deep-sea archivesNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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