"Titanic" director James Cameron returned to the surface Monday after a solo submarine dive to the deepest point in the world's oceans that was hailed as the ultimate test of "man and his machine".
Cameron plunged about seven miles (11 kilometers) to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, where temperatures are barely above freezing and the pressure is a crushing thousand times that at sea level.
Speaking after the mission, the filmmaker-explorer described a barren "completely alien world" on the ocean floor, not unlike the surface of the moon.
It was a "very lunar, very desolate place. Very isolated," Cameron said.
"I felt like I, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and come back," he said, describing the ocean floor as a "completely featureless, alien world."
The acclaimed film director described the experience of hurtling down the "yawning chasm" of the ocean: "Falling through darkness -- that's something that a robot can't describe."
The voyage was the first manned expedition to the trench in more than half a century and Cameron said it was the culmination of more than seven years of planning.
"Most importantly, though, is the significance of pushing the boundaries of where humans can go, what they can see and how they can interpret it," he said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In James Cameron's fantasy films, like "Avatar" and "The Abyss," the unexplored is splashed in color and fraught with alien danger. But on his dive to the deepest place on Earth, reality proved far different: white, barren and bland.
Yet otherworldly — and amazing.
"I felt like I literally, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and come back," Cameron said Monday after returning from the cold, dark place in the western Pacific Ocean, seven miles below the surface. "It was a very surreal day."
Cameron is the first person to explore the deepest valley in the ocean since two men made a 20-minute foray there more than half a century ago. He spent about three hours gliding through the icy darkness, illuminated only by special lights on the one-man sub he helped design. That was only about half as long as planned because his battery ran low.
This deepest section of the 1,500-mile-long Mariana Trench is so untouched that at first it appeared dull. But there's something oddly dark and compelling about the first snippets of video that Cameron shot. It's not what you see, but where it puts you. There is a sense of aloneness that Cameron conveys in the wordless video showing his sub gliding across what he calls "the very soft, almost gelatinous flat plain."
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