Filmmaker James Cameron Going 36,000 Feet Under the Sea

This week, film­mak­er James Cameron (Titan­ic, Avatar, The Abyss) hopes to go where only two men have gone before, div­ing 36,000 feet beneath the sea, to the Mar­i­ana Trench, the deep­est known place on Earth. It’s basi­cal­ly Mount Ever­est in the inverse. Cameron plans to make the his­toric solo jour­ney in The Deepsea Chal­lenger, a 24-foot-long ver­ti­cal tor­pe­do, built secret­ly in Aus­tralia over the last year eight years. (More on that here.) And when he reach­es his des­ti­na­tion, he’ll spend six hours shoot­ing 3‑D video of the trench and col­lect­ing rocks and rare sea crea­tures with a robot­ic arm. Or so that’s the plan.

Above, James Cameron describes his mis­sion in a Nation­al Geo­graph­ic video. Below, you’ll find an ani­ma­tion of the Mar­i­ana Trench dive cre­at­ed by The Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA). You can track Cameron’s voy­age on the Nat­Geo web­site and find a detailed descrip­tion of the actu­al dive right here.