The 57-year-old described diving to a depth of nearly 7 miles in the 12-ton Deepsea Challenger as a “heckuva ride” after resurfacing in the Pacific Ocean, 300 miles southwest of Guam, on Monday morning. Over the weekend, James Cameron successfully made it to the the bottom of the Mariana Trench—the deepest point on Earth. Then, as the pressure increased—pop—the dive craft would have buckled.
– James Cameron's trip to the world's deepest spot sounds a wee bit like something of a disappointment. The six hours he intended to spend at the bottom of the sea—filming and gathering geology samples—was cut in half when hydraulic fluid started leaking in his submersible. As for his time at the bottom, "I didn't see a fish ... I didn't find anything that looked alive to me, other than a few amphipods in the water," he says. "I didn't feel like I got to a place where I could take interesting geology samples or found anything interesting biologically," he noted, according to the New York Post. It took him 156 minutes to go down, but only 70 minutes to come back up after he spotted the leak. "The port got coated" with oil, he said, noting that he lost control of the starboard side of the sub. "That's when I decided to come up. I couldn't go any further—I was just spinning in a circle." But it sounds as though he's planning to go down again: "Next dive. I gotta leave something for the next one," he said. (But hey, at least he's alive. Gizmodo rounds up five ways he could have perished, and they don't sound fun.)