IWatchFilmsNotMovies wrote:

Tom Hopper completely ruins this glorious picture.

The deepest parts of the ocean are the least explored places on our planet. Immense water pressure and a complete absence of sunlight make this environment nearly as unwelcoming as outer space. Yet locked in these dark depths could be clues that will help us better understand our world.

When the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER drops nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers) to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, its mission will be one of scientific exploration and discovery, part of an expedition that will help scientists study alien ecosystems and the tectonic forces that help shape Earth.

Photograph by Mark Thiessen
The crew tests one of two unmanned landers that will be released to the bottom prior to the sub.

It’s possible that the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER will return from the ocean’s deepest point with images and samples of never before seen animals. The pilot will also bring back rocks and images that, coming from the boundaries of two tectonic plates, may give geologists new insight into the forces behind earthquakes. Additionally, scientists predict that many undiscovered microorganisms dwell at these depths. These microbes are specially adapted to withstand incredible pressure, can subsist on unusual food sources, and may inspire new biomedicines and technologies.

The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER will be equipped with a hydraulic manipulator arm that can pick up rocks and animals on the ocean floor. Two unmanned vehicles called landers will also be dropped into the trench—they’ll contain cameras, along with baited plastic traps that will collect creatures and water from the ocean bottom. The images that the pilot captures will give scientists additional context on this poorly understood environment.

Only three other vehicles have made the descent to the Challenger Deep, the world’s deepest known point. In 1960 two men descended there in the bathyscaphe Trieste, a sub bigger than a bus. Once there, they spent only 20 minutes staring at a milky cloud of sediment before returning to the surface. In the 1990s, the Japanese-built Kaiko, an unmanned, robotic submersible, made several trips to nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers) below, picking up sediment and microorganisms along the way. In 2009, the Nereus, also an unmanned vehicle, made its inaugural trip to the Challenger Deep. Built by engineers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Nereus can collect rocks, animals, and water samples and can transmit high-quality video to the surface through a hair-thin fiber-optic cable.

But the Trieste was retired, and in 2003 the Kaiko was lost at sea during a typhoon. Today, the Nereus and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER are the only known vehicles capable of reaching these depths. Cameron’s sub combines the Trieste’s advantages of a human pilot with the abilities of the Kaiko and the Nereus to collect samples and other data.

For scientists, this is an incredible opportunity. “Every time you go down there you see something that no one has ever seen before,” said DEEPSEA CHALLENGE team member Patricia Fryer, a geologist from the University of Hawai‘i who has visited shallower parts of the Mariana Trench. “That is one of the major draws of discovery.”

While thousands of climbers have successfully scaled Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, only two people have descended to the planet’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.

Located in the western Pacific east of the Philippines and 62 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of the U.S. territory of Guam, the Mariana Trench is a crescent-shaped scar in the Earth’s crust that measures more than 1,500 miles (2,550 kilometers) long and 43 miles (69 kilometers) wide on average. The distance between the surface of the ocean and the trench’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep, is nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers). If Mount Everest were dropped into the Mariana Trench, its peak would still be more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) underwater.

The Mariana Trench is part of a global network of deep troughs that cut across the ocean floor. They form when two tectonic plates collide. At the collision point, one of the plates dives beneath the other into the Earth’s mantle, creating an ocean trench.

The depths of the Mariana Trench were first plumbed in 1875 by the British ship H.M.S. Challenger as part of the first global oceanographic cruise. The Challenger scientists recorded a depth of 4,475 fathoms (about five miles, or eight kilometers) using a weighted sounding rope. In 1951, the British vessel H.M.S. Challenger II returned to the spot with an echo-sounder and measured a depth of nearly seven miles (11 kilometers).

Parts of the Mariana Trench—including part of the Challenger Deep—are now U.S. protected zones under a 2009 act by President George W. Bush that established the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Permits for the dive to the Challenger Deep have been secured from authorities in the Federated States of Micronesia.

HISTORIC DIVE

Because of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing. The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is a crushing eight tons per square inch—or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Pressure increases with depth.

The first and only time humans descended into the Challenger Deep was more than 50 years ago. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Don Walsh reached this goal in a U.S. Navy submersible, a bathyscaphe called the Trieste. After a five-hour descent, the pair spent only a scant 20 minutes at the bottom and were unable to take any photographs due to clouds of silt stirred up by their passage.

Until Piccard and Walsh’s historic dive, scientists had debated whether life could exist under such extreme pressure. But at the bottom, the Trieste‘s floodlight illuminated a creature that Piccard thought was a flatfish, a moment that Piccard would later describe with excitement in a book about his journey.

“Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades,” Piccard wrote. “Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could!”

WAITING IN THE DEEP

While the Trieste expedition laid to rest any doubts that life could exist in the Mariana Trench, scientists still know very little about the types of organisms that reside there. In fact, some question whether Piccard’s fish was actually a form of sea cucumber. It is thought that the pressure is so great that calcium can’t exist except in solution, so the bones of vertebrates would literally dissolve. No bones, no fish. But nature has also proven scientists wrong many times in the past with its remarkable capacity for adaptation. So are there fish that deep? Nobody knows, and this is the whole point of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE project, to find answers to such fundamental questions.

In recent years, deep-ocean dredges and unmanned subs have glimpsed exotic organisms such as shrimp-like amphipods and strange, translucent animals called holothurians. But scientists say there are many new species awaiting discovery and many unanswered questions about how animals can survive in these extreme conditions. Scientists are particularly interested in microorganisms living in the trenches, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in biomedicine and biotechnology.

The Mariana Trench’s microscopic inhabitants might even shed light on the emergence of life on Earth. Some researchers, such as Patricia Fryer et al. at the University of Hawai‘i, have speculated that serpentine mud volcanoes located near ocean trenches might have provided the right conditions for our planet’s first life-forms. Additionally, studying rocks from ocean trenches could lead to a better understanding of the earthquakes that create the powerful and devastating tsunamis seen around the Pacific Rim, geologists say.

IWatchFilmsNotMovies wrote:

As a boy, he used to squeeze his body into drainage pipes, snaking along to see how far he could go.

As an adult, he made the two top-grossing movies of all time, “Avatar” and “Titanic.”

And on Wednesday, James Cameron folded his 6-foot-2-inch frame into a 43-inch-wide capsule and plummeted, alone, down five miles in the New Britain Trench off Papua New Guinea. His feat, in a 24-foot-long craft dubbed the Deepsea Challenger, broke by a mile the world depth record for modern vehicles that a Japanese submersible had held.

But he wants to go deeper: This month, Mr. Cameron plans to plunge nearly seven miles to the planet’s most inaccessible spot: the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific, an alien world thought to swarm with bizarre eels and worms, fish and crustaceans. He wants to spend six hours among them, filming the creatures and sucking up samples with a slurp gun.

“It’s a blast,” Mr. Cameron said in an interview during sea trials of his new craft. “There’s nothing more fun than getting bolted into this and seeing things that human beings have never seen before. Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff.”

His attempt is also dangerous. Two people once died in a submersible. Last month, Mr. Cameron lost two members of his team in a fatal helicopter crash.

He built his miniature submarine secretly in Australia, and already it has outdone all other watercraft in its ability to ferry people through the deep’s crushing pressures. As with the birth of the private space rocket industry, where commercial companies are building ships to take astronauts aloft, the debut of Mr. Cameron’s submarine signals the rising importance of entrepreneurs in the global race to advance science and technology.

His goal with his next dive is to tackle a much older record. A half century ago, in a technical feat never equaled, the United States Navy sent two men down nearly seven miles into the Challenger Deep, their vehicle 60 feet long. A window cracked on the way down. The landing stirred up so much ooze that the divers could see little through the portholes, took no pictures and began their ascent after just 20 minutes on the seabed.

Mr. Cameron’s bid is to be unveiled Thursday in Washington by the National Geographic Society, where he holds the title of Explorer-in-Residence. Both the society, which is helping pay for the expedition, and Mr. Cameron took pains to characterize the effort as purely scientific rather than competitive.

It comes as a number of wealthy men — including Richard Branson of the Virgin empire and the Internet guru Eric E. Schmidt — are building or financing miniature submarines meant to transport them, their friends and scientists into the remotest parts of the world’s oceans, including the Challenger Deep.

Mr. Cameron will collect samples for research in biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics. “The science is paramount,” Ellen Stanley, a National Geographic spokeswoman, said in an interview. “We’re out to learn what’s down there.”

Mr. Cameron called his venture “very different from going down and planting a flag” — a seeming reference to how Russian explorers in 2007 put a flag on the seabed under the North Pole. Their deed was meant to strengthen Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed.

The Challenger Deep is in the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. Over the decades, biologists have glimpsed their unfamiliar inhabitants mainly by lowering dredges on long lines. Up have come thousands of strange-looking worms and sea cucumbers. More recently, robot cameras have spied ghostly fish with sinuous tails.

Aboard Mr. Cameron’s expedition is Douglas Bartlett, a professor of marine microbial genetics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an arm of the University of California at San Diego. Last year, Dr. Bartlett led a team that dropped cameras into the Mariana Trench and observed giant amoebas — a first in the inhospitable zone. Known as xenophyophores, these mysterious life forms consist of a single cell and appear able to grow to the size of a fist. Scientists find them exclusively in the deep sea.

National Geographic said the public would be able to follow Mr. Cameron’s expedition at http://www.deepseachallenge.com. It described the project’s main science collaborator as Scripps, followed by the University of Hawaii, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Guam. The film director has long exhibited a fascination with the deep sea, making “The Abyss” (1989), “Titanic” (1997) and a number of documentaries about lost ships, including “Bismarck” (2002) and “Ghosts of the Abyss” (2003), a 3-D tour of the Titanic’s interior. National Geographic said that Mr. Cameron had now made a total of 76 submersible dives, including 33 to the famous luxury liner.

The crew capsules of submersibles are made small to better withstand tons of crushing pressure, and thus have no amenities. Mr. Cameron’s solo model is unusually small, its inner diameter less than four feet.

He said the vehicle over all had many cameras but only one thick porthole, its inner diameter three inches. He described the craft as a “vertical torpedo,” meant to fall and rise quickly so as to maximize time for exploring the seabed.

“You’d be an idiot not to be apprehensive, but I trust the design,” Mr. Cameron said as he contemplated his impending dive. “You’re going into one of the most unforgiving places on earth.”

He said the deaths early last month of his two crew members, Mike deGruy and Andrew Wight — both celebrated filmmakers who specialized in carrying viewers into the sea’s depths — initially prompted him to want to scrap the expedition. The two were preparing to film a sea trial of the Deepsea Challenger when their helicopter went down shortly after takeoff from an airstrip south of Sydney, Australia.

“It was a horrible day,” Mr. Cameron recalled. “We felt sick at heart. It caused us to question risk and the meaning of life. I personally did not want to continue at that point, but the team rallied.”

Mr. Cameron said the project, if successful, will result not only in a number of new scientific findings but two documentary films — one a 3-D production for wide-screen theaters, and the other a National Geographic TV special.

He said that he would take some protein bars with him for the historic dive, but that much of his space was taken up with digital recording decks.

“It’s full of electronics,” Mr. Cameron said. “It’s tight, like a Mercury space capsule.”

IWatchFilmsNotMovies wrote: James Cameron is a fucking legend.