National Geographic will air a special on Sunday documenting director James Cameron's record-setting solo dive last month to the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth. The Avatar director is a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence.
National Geographic Channel (NGC) will premiere the new half-hour special, "James Cameron: Voyage to the Bottom of the Earth," on April 29 at 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. ET/PT and present an encore airing on May 3 at 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. ET/PT. The National Geographic Society previously released under a minute of footage from Cameron's dive in his Deepsea Challenger submersible on YouTube in late March.
"I couldn't think of a better partner," Cameron said of the National Geographic Society, which co-sponsored the Deep Sea Challenge Expedition with Rolex. "National Geographic as an organization has always stood for the spirit of exploration. It's what the magazine and the channel has been famous for, coming back from the boundary of human exploration. It's a legacy of promoting exploration and keeping people excited about something new."
Cameron, who is also an advisor to the asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources, took the Deepsea Challenger sub to a depth of 35,756 feet in late March, spending three hours exploring the "completely featureless" floor of the Pacific Ocean's deepest point before cutting his tour short due to a hydraulic fuel leak.
Only two people have ever been deeper. In 1960, retired U.S. Navy Capt. Don Walsh and the late Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard dropped down a watery elevator to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the submersible Trieste, reaching a maximum depth of 35,797 feet.
After returning for his solo descent, Cameron vowed to return someday.
"It's a prototype vehicle, so it's going to take time to iron out the bugs," he said at the time. "The important thing is that we have a vehicle that's a robust platform—it gets us there safely, the lights work, the cameras work, and hopefully next time the hydraulics will work."
The television special features Cameron's "most personal interview to date on the remarkable journey," according to National Geographic. "James Cameron: Voyage to the Bottom of the Earth" details the development of the historic expedition from its initial phase more than seven years ago through to the director's trip to the oceanic abyss about 300 miles southwest of Guam.
The special also utilizes CGI animation to give a sense of the scale of the depths Cameron visited in a descent that took him deeper than Mt. Everest is high to a lonely, watery environment that looked "like someone rolled latex paint on Masonite ... pretty much the bleakest place I'd seen in the ocean," as the director described the ocean floor.
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