James Cameron's DEEPSEA CHALLENGE 3D | World Science Festival

My name is Christina Simons, and I'm the science coordinator with the Deep Sea Challenge expedition. Jim had a vision for exploring the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It was done in 1950, and not since. And it was to change the design of the sub dramatically, which meant hiring really smart people to build equipment and cameras and lights and batteries that didn't exist, nothing off the shelf. My name's Nick Bingham. I'm an electrical engineer. So I work for a university back home where we build power systems for remote sites. Also, I build laser shows and now and then submarines. The movie's called Deep Sea Challenge 3D, and it's really a story of exploration and a way of getting science to the very bottom of the deepest ocean trenches where we haven't really been very many times before, and we've only been once before man. So we know relatively a lot about planets that are millions of kilometers away. When it comes to the unexplored creatures at the bottom of the ocean, we haven't spent a lot of time or resources there relatively, so it's something we want to know about. And the purpose of this is to signal the fact that we're transitioning from building a sub to operating a sub. So Andrew White came up with a crazy, potentially brilliant idea. Since we're heading to Guam to dive the Challenger Deep, we're going to be going right through Papua New Guinea. There happens to be a spot, they call it Jackanot Bay. This is the perfect place to see a trial of the sub. Vertical rate is 1.3 knots. Time to shed some shot. Get some speed, 35,200 feet, 488 feet to go. I think we've got a problem. We've got a lot of failures here, and I'm coming up to my depth. This is not good. Clock's stopped, my depth gauge is stopped, everything's stopped. Speed's 1.9 knots, I still can't stop from that, I'll hit the bottom too fast. I've got just a couple of minutes to sort this out. Everybody here is here because you're good, because you're good at what you do. And you've proven yourselves to the project. And we're going to go out and do something truly extraordinary. Civilization, it shows us a new way. It gives us an extraordinary number of possibilities for growth. I'm somebody who has an incredible passion for what makes that world work, what makes us act the way we do, and it's just something that I find to be incredibly important, something that we should all value. What's more entertaining, you know what I'm saying, than understanding the world you live in? So when the expedition was approaching their launch date and getting the sub actually into the water to do the science, they brought along three practicing scientists, a microbiologist, a geologist, and a planetary scientist, to sort of reach out to whomever we think might be best suited to help us understand the data we brought back. And because it's so multidisciplinary, that was a first experience for me. I always went out to sea with geologists. So to be out with a planetary scientist and a biologist, I mean, it is, it's one big system. You can't appreciate it by just looking at the geology or just looking at the biology. And to watch that in action and to see them look at each other and say, wait, why aren't we doing this all the time? What I love about this film is you take the Deep Sea Challenge film, you sort of take this exploration of our own final frontier on Earth, the deep sea trenches, and relate that to exploring the solar system and beyond. You know, what we can learn here in an extreme environment is an analog to what we might find somewhere else. My job evolved as the project went on. So at the start, I was working in the factory that was researching and developing the subs. So we were looking at a lot of new technologies, a lot of new ways to get electronic systems to work without pressure housing. So they're at the ambient pressure of the ocean. So we've got pressure chambers that let us simulate that pressure to test things. So we tried a lot of new sort of things. And then we kind of moved into a development phase where we're building the vehicles. So now we know what we can do. We're designing a submarine. And then at the end, we have a mad rush to build a submarine. I think it's probably the quickest build of a submarine in history. And then suddenly, you go straight from building it to being at sea on the expedition. So we were still putting pieces on the submarine while it was on the ship in the Sydney Harbour. I loved science as a kid. I studied physics before I switched into the arts. I thought I was going to be a physicist. I've always had a huge respect for science and a huge curiosity. I do it for the same reason scientists do. They want to know. They want to unlock the riddles of how the natural world really works. And sometimes, you just have to go. You just have to go down there and get some images, get some data, get some samples, and bring it back. This will be my eighth deep ocean expedition. And I know from the films that we've made previously that one of the biggest reasons to make them is to inspire young people about the ideas of exploration and getting them involved in it, getting them participating, making them want to learn science as an aspiration. I love to share this stuff with kids. And what we find is that kids are really open to this. They really think it's cool to go, whether it's into space or into the deep ocean. They don't question it the way adults do. Adults will say, why did you do this? Kids never ask that question. They know why you build a sub and get in it and go look. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology