Rico's rants: Lucky sumbitch

27 March 2012

Lucky sumbitch

William Broad has an article in The New York Times about James Cameron:

No sea monsters. No strange life. No fish. Just amphipods, tiny shrimplike creatures swimming across a featureless plane of ooze that stretched off into the primal darkness. “It was very lunar, a very desolate place,” James Cameron (photo), the movie director, said in a news conference after completing the first human dive in 52 years to the ocean’s deepest spot, nearly seven miles down in the western Pacific. “We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he said, adding that such creatures still might be found. But on this dive he saw “nothing larger than about an inch across”, just the shrimplike creatures, which are ubiquitous scavengers of the deep.
His dive, which had been delayed by rough seas for about two weeks, did not go entirely as planned: his submersible’s robot arm failed to operate properly, and his time at the bottom was curtailed from a planned six hours to about three. It was not entirely clear why.
But he did emerge safely from the perilous trip, vowing to press on. The area he wants to explore, he said, was fifty times larger than the Grand Canyon. “I see this as the beginning,” Cameron said. “It’s not a one-time deal and then you move on. It’s the beginning of opening up this frontier.”
National Geographic, which helped sponsor the expedition to the area known as the Challenger Deep, said that Cameron, the maker of the movies Avatar and Titanic, began his dive on Sunday at 3:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, landed on the bottom at 5:52 p.m. and surfaced at 10 p.m. He conducted the news conference via satellite as he was being rushed to Guam in the hope of reaching London for the debut of Titanic 3-D.
Cameron plunged, solo, in a minisubmarine of his own design. The only other time humans have ventured that deep was in 1960, when the United States Navy sent two men down. Their craft’s landing stirred up so much ooze that the divers could see little. They stayed just twenty minutes.
The Challenger Deep lies off Guam and extends 6.8 miles below the surface. It is the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe.
Cameron detailed his dive, via satellite, from the Octopus, a giant yacht owned by his friend Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. Cameron described the Challenger Deep as possessing a bleak terrain that was all but barren of life. By contrast, he said, his dive five miles into the New Britain Trench off Papua, New Guinea, earlier this month revealed a relative riot of life, including jellyfish and a seabed marked by animal tracks. “I expected the same thing,” he told reporters. “I had this idea that life would adapt to the deepest places.”
The expedition had planned to bait the area with food that might have become a magnet for larger creatures lurking in the dark. But Cameron said his team had been unable to launch what it calls a lander, a robotic device resembling a skinny phone booth. “We didn’t have a chance to do that,” he said. “That’s going to be on the next dive, and we’ll see what’s attracted to the bait.”
Nor did Cameron get a chance to sample much of the sediment, grab rocks with the submersible’s robotic claw, or suck up small creatures with his “slurp gun”. “I lost my hydraulics” to the crushing pressure, he said. “This is to be expected. This is a prototype. It takes a while to iron out the bugs.” Previously, during his dive off Papua New Guinea, he had lost use of one of the submersible’s twelve thrusters.
Cameron said that the expedition had originally planned to conduct a dozen dives in all. But the rough seas and weather were reducing the window to perhaps three or four more. He called the ride down something of a shock, as the crew capsule quickly went from hot “like a sauna” to very cold. The steel walls caused his head and feet to cool, while his body stayed warm. “You’re in total darkness for most of the dive,” Cameron said. “It’s a completely alien world.”