James Cameron becomes first solo explorer to reach the deepest point on Earth

The director of “The Abyss” has reached the abyss.

Filmmaker and ocean enthusiast James Cameron became the first solo explorer to reach the deepest point of the ocean — almost seven miles down — when his custom-built one-man submarine touched down in the western Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench on Sunday, according to a statement from the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the filmmaking and scientific expedition.

The Academy Award winner radioed, “All systems OK,” after hitting bottom at a depth of 35,756 feet, the statement read.

Seven years in the making, the descent by one of the most successful Hollywood directors of all time (“Aliens,” ”The Terminator,” ”Titanic,” ”Avatar”) was delayed for some 16 hours by choppy seas.

But about 4 a.m. local time, seas calmed enough for Cameron to splash his vehicle into the ocean. He began the dive by saying, “Release, release, release!” according to the deepchallenge Twitter account that’s sending out running updates of the adventure.

The National Geographic Society is sponsoring the trip, the first attempt by humans to reach the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, since two U.S. Navy lieutenants touched bottom in January 1960. On that trip, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard spent just 20 minute on the bottom inside the bathyscaphe Trieste. The sub kicked up so much silt that the pair saw virtually nothing outside their porthole.

Cameron’s dive was planned to last about eight hours. According to plan, the innovative “vertical torpedo” — a lime-green submersible called Deepsea Challenger — was to plummet nearly 36,000 feet in just over 90 minutes, the swiftest deep dive with a human pilot. At the end of the dive, Cameron was scheduled to release 1,100 pounds of metal ballast, sending the vehicle shooting to the surface. The pilot sphere is pressurized, so Cameron would not be risk for decompression sickness.

High-tech “syntactic foam” that forms the core of the vehicle will be squeezed by the immense pressures, while a metal sphere less than four feet across will keep Cameron safe. An unmanned test dive Friday proved the sub worthy of surviving the crushing pressures, according to National Geographic News.

Redundant safety systems can detach the sphere and send it toward the surface if problems arise. If the sub gets stuck underwater, ocean saltwater will eat through straps holding the sphere inside the vertical torpedo, releasing it in four to five days.

Four high-definition cameras are recording the trip, with an eight-foot-tall bank of high-intensity lights illuminating the depths of the trench, which lies far beyond the reach of sunlight. The trench is a gash formed where one of the Earth’s huge tectonic plates, the Pacific plate, plunges under another, the Mariana plate.

Besides filming the journey, Cameron planned to collect rocks, soil and any deep-sea creatures he encountered, using hydraulic arms attached to the sub.

Cameron, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, is a longtime ocean explorer. Besides his blockbuster films, he produced a documentary about the wreck of the Titanic in 2003, “Ghosts of the Abyss,” and in 2005 released “Aliens of the Deep,” which documented the strange creatures found in the East Pacific Rise, an underwater mountain range bisecting the Pacific Ocean.

In a 2010 talk, Cameron explained his early love for science fiction and tales of exploration. “The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there’s an alien world here on earth,” he said. “I might not go to an alien world on a spaceship someday — that seemed pretty unlikely. But (the ocean) was a world I could really go to right here on Earth that was as rich and exotic as anything I had imagined from reading these books.”