Cameron dives deep

[X]

The Extended Cut of The Abyss makes it a 100% better film and I adore it.

[Poodyglitz]

The Extended Cut of The Abyss makes it a 100% better film and I adore it.

Yesssss!!!!!!!!!

[Bromptonboy]

Hmm, never saw the extended cut.  I'll have to check it out.

[X]

Hmm, never saw the extended cut.  I'll have to check it out.

If you haven't seen the extended cut, you really haven't seen the movie. It makes so much more sense, but was cut to hell in the theatrical release because it would have run too long.

[Rico]

Well, Cameron had a successful first deep dive.  Very cool stuff!

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

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

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 from the megayacht 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."

As he piloted the futuristic mini-submarine he helped design across the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, at a depth of 35,576 feet, Cameron searched 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" — shrimp-like scavenger creatures 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.

Cameron's day 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. local time Monday began a quick but uncomfortable descent.

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

With four high-definition 3-D cameras filming, Cameron "had his heart set" on grabbing 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 a victim of the crushing 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 for the scientists on the quest, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and watchmaker Rolex.

He cut the planned six-hour bottom time short but kept filming as he steered the lime-green "vertical submarine" up the sloping bottom. He searched for rock outcroppings that might hold exotic communities of tubeworms and other oddities, but he found none.

"This is not a one-time deal where you answer every question," he said. Instead, the journey was the beginning of what he hopes will be a long-term campaign to study the deepest slices of the ocean, the "hadal depths." These trenches make up some 3 percent of the sea bottom — an area as vast as the continental United States — but remain almost entirely unexplored.

Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/james-cameron-bearing-witness-in-the-deepest-dark/2012/03/26/gIQApWF1bS_story.html

[ChrisMC]

Hmm, never saw the extended cut.  I'll have to check it out.

If you haven't seen the extended cut, you really haven't seen the movie. It makes so much more sense, but was cut to hell in the theatrical release because it would have run too long.

Yeah, that really does improve the movie. The Abyss is a pretty underrated movie by most people.

[Rico]

Check it out...

http://youtu.be/KokRJ9l9PoY

[Rico]

Looks like the National Geographic channel aired a special on Cameron's dive last night.  It will be repeated on May 3rd too.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403701,00.asp