MUMBAI: With his visit to the floor of the Mariana Trench‘s Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth, James Cameron has joined the tiny club of explorers who have taken a submersible to such depths.

Talking of his travel, Cameron said that hr had to cut short his record solo descent due to a hydraulic fuel leak in his Deepsea Challenger sub that was later plucked from the Pacific about 300 miles southwest of Guam.

"I see this as the beginning ... of opening up this frontier to science and really understanding these deep places," Cameron has been quoted to have said. The filmmaker is a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence.

Cameron‘s trip to the murky floor of the Mariana Trench was as deep as any human has gone since retired U.S. Navy Capt. Don Walsh and the late Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard dropped down a watery elevator to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the submersible Trieste in 1960.

While Walsh and Piccard had gone down 35,797 feet, Cameron‘s Deepsea Challenger nearly matched by going down 35,756 feet.

In recent years, there have been a pair of descents to similar depths made by remotely operated, robotic submersibles.