Challenger Deep as a tourist site? Modern-day Jules Vernes say 'yes'
There's not much to see in the blackness seven miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. But enthusiasts can envision the day when citizen adventurers would descend to Challenger Deep and other deep-sea destinations.
Crews continue in-water testing of the Deepsea Challenger submersible before explorer and 'Titanic' filmmaker James Cameron piloted to Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, in Australia on Sunday.
Mark Thiessen/National Geographic/Reuters
Miami
Had it been a write-up in a travel brochure, it would not have sounded the most tempting of destinations. “Come to Challenger Deep,” it might have said. “No sunlight, freezing cold – and fish is off the menu.”
If anyone had expected James Cameron to return from seven miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean with descriptions of picture-postcard scenery and breathtaking fauna, they would have been disappointed. The bottom of the world is featureless and bleak, with no obvious signs of life, he revealed.
“Back from trip to deepest place on Earth – oceans hadel zone,” he tweeted after resurfacing March 26, using the name for ocean depths so formidable that they are likened to Hades’ underworld. “Puts a new spin on ‘to hell and back,’ ” he quipped.
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Yet the idea of plummeting 35,756ft to the sea floor, cruising the bottom in a submersible “in complete isolation from all humanity,” and exploring an environment so alien in appearance that it seemed to Mr. Cameron to resemble another planet, or the moon, is one that he and others are keen to repeat.
The Canadian film director’s remarkable plunge to the bottom of the Mariana Trench marks a new era of exploration that in the coming years is likely to expand scientific understanding and possibly even make areas of the deep ocean a hot-ticket tourism destination.
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