Following the tragedy that left five billionaires dead after boarding the OceanGate Titan watercraft on June 18, James Cameron has been the talk of the town for his many successful submersible dives.
Last week, five passengers- Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British businessman Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush- boarded the submersible in a bid to view the Titanic wreck that sunk in 1912 killing more than 1,500 people.
However, their submersible imploded, with Cameron poking holes into the ill-fated submersible.
Who is Cameron
Cameron grew up in Ontario, Canada, hundreds of miles from the ocean.
He told National Geographic that as a youngster, he watched with “amazement” sea explorers like Jacques Cousteau’s specials.
“It was such a golden age of technological exploration,” Cameron said of the time as quoted by CNN.
At the age of 17, Cameron said he began scuba diving, which increased his love of ocean exploration.
In 2012, he told National Public Radio that there is a connection between what he does professionally in films and his personal life as an explorer.
Cameron's expedition
The Hollywood film director who directed the 1997 movie Titanic has made 33 successful submersible dives to the Titanic wreck.
He first visited the wreck of the Titanic in 1995 when he dived 13,000 feet deep into the North Atlantic Ocean to capture footage for his documentary.
According to National Geographic, he made about 12 trips to the wreckage on a submersible when he signed on to direct Titanic.
“I made ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive into the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie,” Cameron told Playboy in 2009 as quoted by CNN.
“The Titanic was the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver, I wanted to do it right. When I learned some other guys had dived to the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, ‘I’ll make a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing. I loved that first taste, and I wanted more.”
According to CNN, the explorer did it in a 24-foot submersible vehicle he helped design making him the Deepsea Challenger.
Cameron has travelled to the deepest point in the ocean- Mariana Trench.
He made the visit to the 35,787 feet deep trench in the Pacific Ocean in 2012, breaking the record for the longest solo dive.
CNN noted that it took seven years of planning and he spent more than three hours filming, documenting and taking samples while he was there.
The Titanic wreck
The Titanic which was praised as unsinkable before, hit an iceberg and sank.
It now lies on the ocean floor under 12,500 feet of water, roughly 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, a province in northeastern Canada.
It was first discovered by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1985.
In 1986, submarine Alvin also explored the Titanic wreck. Alvin is a watercraft-manned deep-ocean research submersible owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
It has made more than 4,400 dives, carrying two scientists and a pilot, to observe the lifeforms that must cope with super-pressures and move about in total darkness.
The first official salvage expedition was conducted in 1987 and approximately 1,800 artefacts were collected. The artefacts were brought back to France for conservation and curation.
Edited by Mercy Asamba
