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Joined: Oct 1999
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Marty Offline OP
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For centuries, the daredevils known as submariners have slipped beneath the waves in vehicles made for horizontal travel. Their craft are basically underwater ships. Even submersibles, small vessels that dive unusually deep, follow the horizontal plan.


The Challenger Deep takes a test dive off the coast of New Guinea

Until now.

In a stroke, James Cameron has upended the field - literally and figuratively. A man known for imaginative films ("Titanic," "Avatar"), he has reinvented the way that people explore the deep ocean.

This month, Mr. Cameron unveiled his unique submersible and announced plans to ride it solo into the planet's deepest recess, the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific, nearly seven miles down.

He calls it a vertical torpedo. The axis of his 24-foot-long craft is upright rather than horizontal, speeding the plunge. His goal is to fall and rise as quickly as possible so he can maximize his time investigating the dark seabed. He wants to prowl the bottom for six hours.

"It's very clever," said Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner who helps to run a company that makes submersibles. "Nobody has done this kind of thing before. It's a great idea, a tremendous idea."

He likened Mr. Cameron to "an underwater Steve Jobs - difficult to get along with but very creative."

"He's driven," Dr. McLaren went on. "He put together a hell of a technical team."

Just as bullets are spun to steady their flight, Mr. Cameron's craft rotates on its vertical axis - another first. In a test dive, he has already broken the modern depth record for piloted vehicles, going down more than five miles.

"He's done something radical," said Peter Girguis, a biological oceanographer at Harvard and head of a panel that oversees the nation's fleet of deep-research vehicles. "He's set aside the conventional wisdom."

Mr. Cameron sees his craft - built in secrecy in Australia over eight years - as greatly expanding the power of scientists to explore the abyss. On the Challenger Deep expedition, he is working with the National Geographic Society, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Hawaii and other scientific groups.

"It's really fun," he said in an interview during sea trials off Papua New Guinea. "There's no bigger high in my world."

Click here to read the rest of the article and see more photos in the New York Times


Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 84,396
Marty Offline OP
OP Offline

Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 84,396
Marty Offline OP
OP Offline


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