“Until humanity can mine asteroids for their valuable metallic resources, Cameron said it was “far better” to mine the deep sea than in rainforests and more ecologically sensitive areas.”
Exploring the greatest depths of the ocean is “safer than getting an elevator and safer than getting on an airplane” James Cameron has said. But the Canadian director of Hollywood blockbusters added that the team behind the recent ill-fated expedition to the Titanic lacked the imagination to engineer against the “most obvious risks” to any deep sea voyage.
In an interview with the Guardian, Cameron said that when he travelled to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench – the deepest known point on the Earth – in a custom-made submersible, “we imagined just about every risk that was humanly possible – and we engineered against all of them.”
The staunch conservationist and Indigenous rights advocate also said his time traversing the deep sea had influenced his support for mining the sea floor, a controversial prospect that has seen a wave of opposition in recent weeks ahead of a key decision on the industry’s future.
Last month, the OceanGate Expeditions founder, Stockton Rush, veteran explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and three tourists ventured below the depths of the north Atlantic to view wreckage of the Titanic. The submersible, named Titan, lost contact with the surface more than an hour and a half into the journey, prompting a frantic international search and rescue effort.
For the rest of this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/22/james-cameron-interview-titan-deep-sea-mining