According to a report on http://news.nationalgeographic.com, explorer and film maker James Cameron has arrived at the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep, members of the National Geographic expedition have confirmed.
According to the report, his depth on arrival was 35,756 ft. (10,898 m).
Cameron is just the third person to reach this Pacific Ocean valley southwest of Guam (map)—and the only one to do so solo.
After as long as six hours in the trench, Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface.
Upon touchdown at Challenger Deep, Cameron's first target is a phone booth-like unmanned "lander" dropped into the trench hours before his dive.
Using sonar, "I'm going to attempt to rendezvous with that vehicle so I can observe animals that are attracted to the chemical signature of its bait," Cameron told National Geographic News before the dive.
Taking Cameron to these amazing depths is the Deepsea Challenger, a “Bullet to the Deep” which measures 24 ft. in length.Engineered to sink upright and spinning, like a bullet fired straight into the Mariana Trench, the sub can descend about 500 feet (150 meters) a minute.
Among the sub's tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a "slurp gun" for sucking up small sea creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges.