James Cameron, the 57-year-old director of Titanic, Avatar, and The Abyss, is the first man to reach the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, 10,898 meters below sea level, aboard a special submarine. With the Deepsea Challenge mission, organized with the support of National Geographic, the director spent approximately three hours on the Pacific ocean floor, collecting surface samples for scientific research and taking photographs. Before him, only Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh had explored the Mariana Trench, on January 23, 1960, aboard the Italian-built bathyscaphe Trieste, but without reaching the depth reached by the Canadian director. The seabed had previously been reached only by two robotic submarines: the Japanese Kaiko in 1995 and the American Nereus in 2009.
