Richard Branson (right) and explorer Chris Welsh announced in April they would take a solo piloted sub to the deepest points in each of the five oceans. Virgin Oceanic says design modifications have slowed the pace of their bid.
Richard Branson (right) and explorer Chris Welsh announced in April they would take a solo piloted sub to the deepest points in each of the five oceans. Virgin Oceanic says design modifications have slowed the pace of their bid.
Photograph by: Gabriel Bouys, AFP, Getty Images Files , Sunday Telegraph
It is the lowest point on the surface of the Earth's crust and one of the most forbidding spots on the planet, cloaked in cold, darkness and enduring mystery.
Inhabited by organisms that resemble some of the earliest life forms, it is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, with access so risky and complex that it has had just two human visitors since its formation nine million years ago.
Now, in what could be the culmination of a so-called "race to inner space," James Cameron, the Hollywood director, may be poised to dash the hopes of Britain's Richard Branson's Virgin Oceanic team of being the first 21st-century aquanaut to reach Challenger Deep, the nethermost location in any of the world's oceans.
America's civil submarine construction community is abuzz with word that the 57-year-old Canadian filmmaker is preparing to make a treacherous solo descent of the nearly 11,000-metre-deep abyss, in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, within weeks.
Curling his 6-foot-1 frame inside a cramped submersible built to with-stand the crushing water pressure - equivalent to 8,000 elephants standing on a Mini Cooper - his attempt will, if successful, hand him a record that Branson and his pilot Chris Welsh had originally aimed to gain by the end of last year.
Cameron's team members are sworn to secrecy and his office refused to comment.
But his vessel and ambitions are considered credible by experts, including Don Walsh, a retired U.S. navy captain and one of the two-man crew who voyaged to Challenger Deep aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960. He has given the mission - and the man he calls "Cousteau on steroids" - his blessing.
"Jim is a remarkable guy who's never trained as an engineer but has an intuitive grasp of engineering details that far surpasses a lot of the professionals I've known," Walsh, 80, told the Sun-day Telegraph.
"He hasn't wasted a lot of time trumpeting to the world, 'We're going to do this.' He wants to make sure he's got it right and then he'll tell the world. He's a pretty high-profile person and he doesn't want to screw up royally."
He added: "More men have gone to the Moon than to the deepest point on Earth. They went with rockets and fire up their ----and walked around in funny suits planting flags. With diving, you just disappear quietly into the depths and hope you come back up."
Cameron is a self-described "science junkie" whose passion for ocean exploration inspired him to make the 1997 film Titanic, the 2003 underwater documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, and in 2005 Aliens of the Deep, in which he joined NASA scientists investigating submerged mountain ranges in the Pacific and Atlantic.
Losing pressure in the passenger compartment would cause his vessel to implode. Even the tiniest leak would send a jet of water rushing in at such high pressure that it would slice the craft in half.
"There have been white-knuckle moments, complete power failures where we've had to use emergency ballast systems to get back," he told Popular Mechanics magazine last year. "Your life is at risk any time you go into a hostile environment like that - but you trust the engineering."
Cameron has passed thousands of hours beneath the waves and has spent recent weeks making final preparations in Australia, including testing documentary cameras in Sydney Harbour.
Two other outfits have declared an intention to reach Challenger Deep, though not in the immediate future. Branson is the only party to have characterized the quest in competitive terms, stating last April that Welsh aimed to pilot the first solo expedition there as part of a plan to dive to the deepest points in the world's five oceans.
Despite the outward signs of competition, Cameron and Virgin Oceanic's teams - along with Triton Submarines and DOER, two other developers who have their sights on the Mariana Trench - have assisted one another's progress.
"Of course there's some desire behind each individual to be first but the nice thing about working with Cameron is that we get to share some of the technology together," said Eddie Kisfaludy, Virgin Oceanic's operations manager.
The company concedes that design modifications have slowed the pace of the Virgin bid. Kisfaludy declined to specify when Virgin's vessel will be ready, but said that development of their craft was "moving on nicely," with its first trials in shallow water completed.
But Bruce Jones, chief executive of Triton Submarines, gave his own take on the progress.
"Jim Cameron is going to be the first to get there," he said. "We don't believe the Branson/Welsh project has legs; we think there's just one too many technical problems."
Located in an industrial unit in Vero Beach, Fla., Triton is working on developing larger submersibles that will open up the Mariana Trench to new generations of explorers, scientists and $250,000-a-ticket deepsea tourists.
"We don't want something where we just go to the bottom and shout 'Woo-hoo!' and then put it in a museum like Cameron," said Triton's vice-president Marc Deppe.
"We hope we're wrong about Bran-son, we hope they get to the point of being able to make a successful dive.
"We want to bring the ocean to the world in an inspiring and sustained way that will make kids go, 'Wow, I want to be an explorer, I want to know more about the ocean.'"
It was on Jan 23, 1960, that Capt. Walsh and Jacques Piccard set the deep-diving record, setting down their bathyscaphe - a 15-metre craft resembling a submarine but operated by a manual system of weights and floats - at close to the lowest spot in the Mariana Trench.
Their journey challenged theories that life could not exist at such depth, after they reported seeing fish and other organisms on the sea bed.
Yet 52 years later, it - and much of the world's other deep ocean environments - remain an enigma.
"Less than two per cent of the oceans have been explored and yet what could be down there? Maybe cures to degenerative diseases, maybe answers to the world's food problems," said Deppe.
HOW DEEP CAN THEY GO?
Several explorers, including Canadian film director James Cameron and British entrepreneur Richard Branson, are in an informal race to be the first in a generation to reach the deepest point on Earth. How their trip would compare to other deep-diving records:
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