James Cameron, the director of Titanic and Avatar, has stated that exploring the deep ocean is “safer than getting an elevator and safer than getting on an airplane.” However, he criticised the team behind the ill-fated Titan submersible for failing to address the “most obvious risks” of deep-sea travel.
In an interview with the Guardian, Cameron said that when he travelled to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, his team “imagined just about every risk that was humanly possible – and we engineered against all of them.” He noted that conceptualising risk is crucial for journeys where minor equipment failure can be catastrophic, drawing on his experience on NASA’s advisory council after the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck last month, killing all five on board. Critics, including Cameron, have raised concerns about the use of a carbon-fibre hull. Cameron emphasised that there have been “zero fatalities” in the deep submergence community over half a century, but “it takes one incident to wake everybody up.”
Cameron also voiced support for deep-sea mining, a controversial activity opposed by many environmentalists. He argued that mining the seafloor is “far better” than mining rainforests, describing large areas of the ocean floor as “miles and miles of nothing but clay.” He acknowledged being an “outlier” on this issue.
