Only the Third Person in Human History Visits the Challenger Deep

If you should by chance find yourself in the Pacific Ocean - 62 miles southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean and 35,756 feet straight down, you might find it interesting to know that you are in very elite company. For you have entered into the Challenger Deep portion of the Mariana Trench, the lowest point on Earth, or the deepest part of the Pacific ocean.

Until March 26 2012 the only submarine to visit this area was Navy submersible Trieste, which carried the only two people who had ever dived on the deep, Don Walsh, a retired United States Navy captain, and Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, reached the spot on Jan. 23, 1960.

On March 26th film director and James Cameron became the third person to bottom of the deep, in the submarine Deepsea Challenger .  Cameron's attempt is even more unusual in that he did the dive solo and there-for the first and only person to do so.

At 35 thousand plus feet below the surface, pressure on a vehicle reaches a staggering 16,000 pounds per square inch, rivaling the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus. The environment, at this depth, is so hostile that more people have visited the moon.




NY Times Environment article  Wiki Deepsea Challenger article

Making of the Abyss

Hey, did you ever see James Cameron's "The Abyss"? I know this is horribly dated, but I am willing to bet to this day there has not been a movie made that matches the scale or technical difficulty that this movie took to make. It still rates right up there as one of my all time favorite science fiction movies and not for the end, because the end was a cop out and a sell out and didn't come within a row of assholes of making sense, but up to that point wow, it's Alien only underwater where EVERYTHING kills you! The reason there was never a remake or part two? No one would go back for a remake.

So anyway, here is part one of six. If you have not seen this making of and liked the movie...do yourself a favor and watch this.

Video Short: Laser Cats 5 from SNL

A spectacularly bad and outrageously funny SNL skit with the help of James Cameron and "Ripley", plus a rip on I think every Cameron movie he ever made. It's Laser Cats 5



Thanks to Gizmodo for the post

James Cameron is go for start on movie Avatar

Fox has officially announced that James Cameron is set to direct Avatar, with an April start date and new casting.

Cameron has cast Australian Sam Worthington in the lead role of Jake Sully after global screen tests. Zoe Saldana (Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl) will portray the local woman Jake gets involved with. Both actors have signed on for possible future installments as well, as Cameron and Fox see Avatar as a potential franchise. Other casting will be announced shortly.

Written by Cameron, who has been developing the story for over a decade, Avatar is the story of a wounded ex-marine who is unwillingly sent to settle and exploit a faraway planet. He gets caught up in a battle for survival by the planet's inhabitants.