Until now. In a stroke, James Cameron has upended the field — literally and figuratively. A man known for imaginative films (“Titanic,” “Avatar”), he has reinvented the way that people explore the deep ocean. This month, Mr. Cameron unveiled his unique submersible and announced plans to ride it solo into the planet’s deepest recess, the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific, nearly seven miles down. He calls it a vertical torpedo. The axis of his 24-foot-long craft is upright rather than horizontal, speeding the plunge. His goal is to fall and rise as quickly as possible so he can maximize his time investigating the dark seabed. He wants to prowl the bottom for six hours. “It’s very clever,” said Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner who helps to run a company that makes submersibles. “Nobody has done this kind of thing before. It’s a great idea, a tremendous idea.” He likened Mr. Cameron to “an underwater Steve Jobs — difficult to get along with but very creative.” “He’s driven,” Dr. McLaren went on. “He put together a hell of a technical team.” Just as bullets are spun to steady their flight, Mr. Cameron’s craft rotates on its vertical axis — another first. In a test dive, he has already broken the modern depth record for piloted vehicles, going down more than five miles. “He’s done something radical,” said Peter Girguis, a biological oceanographer at Harvard and head of a panel that oversees the nation’s fleet of deep-research vehicles. “He’s set aside the conventional wisdom.” Mr. Cameron sees his craft — built in secrecy in Australia over eight years — as greatly expanding the power of scientists to explore the abyss. On the Challenger Deep expedition, he is working with the National Geographic Society, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Hawaii and other scientific groups. “It’s really fun,” he said in an interview during sea trials off Papua New Guinea. “There’s no bigger high in my world.” Mr. Cameron, now near the Challenger Deep in the expedition’s ship, is awaiting calm seas for what experts called an audacious bid that will shed light on a hidden world of strange life forms. The deep sea is much harder to explore than outer space. Far from the sun’s warming rays, the inky darkness miles down hovers at temperatures near freezing. Seawater is also corrosive, often full of debris and largely opaque to light and radio waves. Most daunting of all, it is extraordinarily heavy. In the Challenger Deep, the waters overhead exert a downward pressure of more than eight tons per square inch. Typically, submersibles fight the extremes with bright lights and cramped personnel spheres — the shape that can best resist crushing pressures. Explorers dress warmly and communicate with mother ships on beams of sound. They peer out of tiny portholes that are extraordinarily thick. Until now, the world’s most advanced submersibles were built by governments. They can go as deep as 2.8 miles (the United States), 3.2 miles (China), 3.7 miles (France and Russia), and 4 miles (Japan). All follow the horizontal plan; most look like squat submarines with large tail thrusters. Mr. Cameron plans to plummet 6.8 miles. The Challenger Deep is the most remote area of the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. He is to cram his 6-foot-2 frame into a personnel sphere just 43 inches wide, forcing him to keep his knees bent and his body largely immobile. The dive plan calls for him to remain in that position for up to nine hours.
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