miktay
09-20-2010, 05:47 PM
At the deep end of the ocean...
As director James Cameron plans to film Avatar sequel seven miles below the sea's surface, we go into the deadly deep with the only two men who've been there
Five thousand fathoms under the waves, a deafening clang rang out through the cramped, freezing submarine, causing the whole *vessel to shake like a leaf.
Squinting through their tiny Plexiglas window into the abyss, the two explorers’ hearts missed
a beat.
‘It was a pretty hairy experience,’ they said afterwards with some understatement. The outer
layer of their porthole had cracked under the *unimaginable weight of six miles of seawater — and they still had more than a mile to descend.
Fortunately, their so-called ‘bathyscaphe’ *submarine, an extraordinary piece of Swiss-*Italian-*German engineering, sustained no further damage, and the explorers — Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh — lived to tell the extraordinary tale of this unique descent.
Twelve men have walked on the surface of the Moon and maybe 500 have travelled into space, but only Piccard and Walsh have visited the very deepest point of the ocean, which they reached on January 23, 1960.
The Challenger Deep dive was one of the most extraordinary — and surprisingly little known — feats of human exploration in history, the voyage in a submarine to a place even more extreme than the surface of most planets.
Now it has been announced that the multi-Oscar-winning film director James Cameron plans to add his name to the very exclusive club of those who have travelled to the *bottom of the Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, and the deepest known point in the world’s oceans.
Cameron — who, after all, made a fortune with Titanic — plans a follow-up to his billion-dollar 3D blockbuster Avatar, this time set in the teeming oceans of the film’s fictional alien planet of Pandora.
And last weekend it was reported that he has commissioned a bespoke submarine, built of high-tech, man-made composite materials and powered by electric motors, which will be capable of surviving the tremendous pressures at a depth of seven miles, from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar’s sequel.
It seems bizarre that no one has repeated the feat of Piccard and Walsh in more than half a century (two unmanned submersible robots have made the trip since). But then no one has to date built a working replacement for their vessel, the Trieste.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312406/Into-deadly-deep-How-James-Cameron-plans-film-Avatar-sequel-7-miles-seas-surface.html
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/09/15/article-1312406-0B347315000005DC-765_634x678.jpg
As director James Cameron plans to film Avatar sequel seven miles below the sea's surface, we go into the deadly deep with the only two men who've been there
Five thousand fathoms under the waves, a deafening clang rang out through the cramped, freezing submarine, causing the whole *vessel to shake like a leaf.
Squinting through their tiny Plexiglas window into the abyss, the two explorers’ hearts missed
a beat.
‘It was a pretty hairy experience,’ they said afterwards with some understatement. The outer
layer of their porthole had cracked under the *unimaginable weight of six miles of seawater — and they still had more than a mile to descend.
Fortunately, their so-called ‘bathyscaphe’ *submarine, an extraordinary piece of Swiss-*Italian-*German engineering, sustained no further damage, and the explorers — Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh — lived to tell the extraordinary tale of this unique descent.
Twelve men have walked on the surface of the Moon and maybe 500 have travelled into space, but only Piccard and Walsh have visited the very deepest point of the ocean, which they reached on January 23, 1960.
The Challenger Deep dive was one of the most extraordinary — and surprisingly little known — feats of human exploration in history, the voyage in a submarine to a place even more extreme than the surface of most planets.
Now it has been announced that the multi-Oscar-winning film director James Cameron plans to add his name to the very exclusive club of those who have travelled to the *bottom of the Challenger Deep, part of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, and the deepest known point in the world’s oceans.
Cameron — who, after all, made a fortune with Titanic — plans a follow-up to his billion-dollar 3D blockbuster Avatar, this time set in the teeming oceans of the film’s fictional alien planet of Pandora.
And last weekend it was reported that he has commissioned a bespoke submarine, built of high-tech, man-made composite materials and powered by electric motors, which will be capable of surviving the tremendous pressures at a depth of seven miles, from which he will shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar’s sequel.
It seems bizarre that no one has repeated the feat of Piccard and Walsh in more than half a century (two unmanned submersible robots have made the trip since). But then no one has to date built a working replacement for their vessel, the Trieste.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312406/Into-deadly-deep-How-James-Cameron-plans-film-Avatar-sequel-7-miles-seas-surface.html
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/09/15/article-1312406-0B347315000005DC-765_634x678.jpg