Four descents have been achieved. The first was the manned descent by Swiss-designed, Italian-built, United States Navy-owned bathyscaphe Trieste which reached the bottom at 1:06 pm on 23 January 1960.
This was followed by the unmanned ROVs Kaikō in 1996 and Nereus in 2009.
The fourth was made by Canadian film director James Cameron in 2012.
Why take a shot at Cameron? How has he done anything other than bring attention to the importance of better understanding the deep seas, and helped create devices that can help with that objective?
Well, if I’m mistaken I’ll apologize, but my impression was that his excursion was little more than grandstanding. If you’re aware of any discoveries or technological breakthroughs that were made as a result though, I would certainly like to hear about them. However even in that case, I somehow doubt that the cost/benefit analysis will be anything comparable to what could have been achieved by actual scientists with the money that was spent. In which case, I’ll stick to my original statement.
Not about the Mariana Trench per se but in a special on the Titanic he routinely dismissed the ideas of marine engineers and other experts when they conflicted with his own opinion. He struck me as someone who read wikipedia for 15 minutes and is now an “expert”.
Here is the third result from Google when looking up “mariana trench”. It’s a pretty extensive article about Cameron’s team, and the bonanza of scientific discoveries from just Cameron’s descent, and an allusion to the fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg, as Cameron’s team has copyright on the images, which they’re saving for a documentary release. I’d hardly call it “grandstanding”.
