James Cameron ‘bearing witness’ in the deepest dark

For three decades, filmmaker James Cameron has vividly rendered alien worlds.

On Monday, ocean explorer James Cameron visited one: the bottom of the sea.

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Filmmaker and National Geographic explorer-in-residence successfully completes dive to ocean’s deepest point during DEEPSEA CHALLENGE Expedition.

Nine hours after completing a historic solo dive to the deepest slice of the ocean floor, Cameron described his “very surreal day” in the language of an astronaut.

“When I came down, landed, it was very, very soft, almost gelatinous, a flat plain, almost featureless plain, and it just went out of sight as far as I could see,” Cameron said when he got back to the mega yacht Octopus, owned by his friend, Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.

“The impression to me, it was very lunar, a very desolate place, very isolated,” Cameron said. “My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity. I felt like I had literally, in the space of one day, gone to another planet and come back.”

Cameron’s adventure began at midnight, a day late because of choppy seas. He prepped the Deepsea Challenger for a few hours, then at 5:15 a.m. his time Monday began a quick but uncomfortable descent.

His goal when he got to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean — a depth of 35,576 feet — was to search for life. “We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he said. There weren’t. He saw no fish, either. He found “nothing larger than about an inch across” — shrimplike scavengers called amphipods.

Cameron described extremes of pressure and temperature like those experienced by space travelers. He scrunched himself into a tiny metal pilot sphere “kind of like a Mercury astronaut,” the first American space travelers.

Electronics packed into the pilot sphere quickly heated the interior to 100 degrees. But after “one or two minutes” of plunging, the ocean temperature dropped to 36 degrees. The cold seeped in to his head and feet, which were pressed against metal; the core of his body stayed warm.

With high-definition 3-D cameras filming, Cameron wanted to grab rock and sediment samples with the sub’s hydraulic arms. But soon after taking his first sample, a swirl of hydraulic fluid drifted past his porthole. The arm was dead, its liquid lines crushed by pressure. A bit of the sediment survived inside a container and made it to the surface, but Cameron had to abandon plans to grab extensive samples on the quest, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

He kept filming as he steered the lime-green “vertical submarine” up the sloping sea bottom. He searched for rock outcroppings that might hold exotic communities of tubeworms and other oddities, but he found none.

Problems mounted, and Cameron cut the planned six hours of bottom time to three. “I lost a lot of thrusters,” Cameron said immediately after the dive, according to a recording made at the time. “I lost the whole starboard side. That’s when I decided to come up. I couldn’t go any further — I was just spinning in a circle.”

Human deep-ocean exploration, too, has been spinning in circles since January 1960, when the only other piloted trip to this deepest spot in the ocean, called the Challenger Deep, occurred. U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard touched bottom in the Trieste, a 150-ton blimplike behemoth. But with just 20 minutes on the bottom — and with their view obscured by silt — that trip was a technological rather than scientific success.