TITANIC
How many times has James Cameron dived to the Titanic? What did he travel in?
Movie director Cameron became a deep-sea explorer in the 1990s, with his feature film Titanic released in 1997.
James Cameron has directed nine movies in his career, several of which, including The Terminator, Aliens and Avatar, are amongst the biggest ever made. There is an argument to say, however, that the 1997 movie Titanic, a part-historical, part-fictionalised account of the sinking of the ship in 1912, is the one he is most associated with.
Why did Cameron make Titanic?
The reason Cameron decided to work on the film is because of his fascination with shipwrecks, which he has never hidden and which has been made clear by the number of times he has dived to the foot of the Atlantic Ocean to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. “I made Titanic because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie,” he told Playboy in 2009.
How many people have visited the Titanic wreckage? How many times has Cameron been?
It is estimated that sunken vessel sits at around 3.8 kilometres (12,500 feet, if you prefer) below sea level, just less than five times deeper than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is high. Not that that has ever put Cameron off. Far from it.
It is estimated that only around 200 people have ever seen the world’s most famous shipwreck up close, with the Canadian have done so on no fewer than 33 different occasions. Considering he has made one of the most successful movies of all time on the very subject, he had every reason to become a deep-sea explorer in the 1990s.
Cameron’s love for deep-sea diving
Cameron is part-owner of Triton Submarines, who make submersibles for both research and tourism, as well as a member of the Manned Underwater Vehicle (MUV) community. After it was confirmed on Thursday that the Titan submersible heading for the Titanic had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”, the director revealed to Reuters that he, like many in the industry, knew that OceanGate Inc was making a deep-sea submersible with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull, and regeretted not voicing his concerns.
Titan “a horrible idea”
“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face.”
While Cameron has not spoken specifically about which vehicle he used to visit the shipwreck, he has talked about making ‘submarine dives’ - rather than ‘submersible dives’ - in the past. The main difference between the two is that while a submarine has enough power to launch itself from port and return to port by its own means, a submersible relies on a mothership or support vessel that can launch it, recover it and guide it.
Mariana Trench visit
We do know how he descended to the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in any of the Earth’s oceans, in 2012. And it was he himself who designed a 24-foot submersible called the Deepsea Challenger, which took 10 years to build at a cost of $10 million, and is made of principally from syntactic foam, a high-strength, low-weight material called syntactic foam, which enables it to withstand the huge pressure exerted on it by the ocean.
Safe to say that Cameron know a thing or two about deep-sea diving and isn’t prepared to risk his – or anyone else’s – safety while doing it. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to have been the case with OceanGate and the Titan.