James Cameron’s decade-old trip to the depths of the ocean is getting renewed attention, in the wake of the missing Titan submersible.
The Titan, an OceanGate Expeditions vessel, lost contact less than two hours into its mission, and fear is rising that the long-lost Titanic may have claimed yet more lives, more than a century after it first sank to the ocean depths. Five people are aboard the missing Titan, and they’re fast running out of air — in less than three days, from initial launch to rescue, we’ll be searching for bodies, rather than living people.
As the frantic search continues, many people are recalling another maritime mission from more than a decade back. Film director James Cameron, who’s produced endless hits over the years — including 1997’s Titanic — made his own trip to the depths of the ocean back in 2012, and rumors continue to claim he set out on the journey for the same reasons the crew of the Titan did — to set sights on the long-sunken Titanic. This claim, which is certainly believable given Cameron’s history, isn’t actually true. Cameron actually headed tens of thousands of feet into the unexplored depths half a world away from the famed passenger liner.
Cameron’s deep sea dive
Cameron’s venture into the ocean’s abyss was prompted, not necessarily by his work on Titanic, but by an earlier dive the director and explorer undertook. A decade before his major, groundbreaking journey occurred, Cameron was diving a far smaller distance — around 16,000 feet — in hopes of exploring the wreckage of the German battleship Bismarck. This voyage put the idea of a far riskier mission in Cameron’s head, one that was eventually launched ten years later.
It wasn’t until 2012 that Cameron finally had all the necessary elements ready for a dive into the Mariana Trench. He, and a carefully curated team of directors, engineers, and various dedicated experts, located a vessel able to make the journey, and developed cameras capable of withstanding immense pressure to likewise document the voyage.
Then, Cameron launched himself, in a 24 foot vessel called the Deepsea Challenger — decked out with high-tech 3D cameras — into the deepest oceanic trench on Earth, on March 26, 2012. His journey to the ocean floor took around two and a half hours (two hours and 37 minutes, to be exact), and he remained at the bottom of the Challenger Deep — the deepest point of the Mariana Trench — for around three hours before ascending once again.
Cameron’s wasn’t the first-ever expedition into the Challenger Deep, but it was the first solo mission, and he remained on the ocean floor the longest. In total, he ventured 35,756 feet into the ocean, stayed for several hours, and broke multiple records in the process. He wasn’t seeking out the Titanic, he was simply seeking out knowledge, and he certainly accomplished that.