James Cameron plans 7-mile ocean dive into the Mariana Trench

James Cameron, award winning director and inventor, said this week that he would dive solo into the 7-mile deep Mariana Trench - the deepest place in the world.

Award winning director and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, James Cameron, said this week that he would dive solo into the 7-mile deep Mariana Trench - the deepest place on earth.

The New York Times reported that Cameron plans to dive almost seven miles into the Challenger Deep, a small valley on the floor of the trench that is considered the most inaccessible place on earth and currently unexplored by humans.

Cameron wants to spend six hours in the trench observing, filming and taking samples from a "slurp gun."

In an earlier statement quoted by the Associated Press, Cameron said, "The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet, with scientific riches enough to fill a hundred years of exploration."

Cameron had a miniature submarine - which he helped to design - built secretely in Australia, according to the New York Times, which has already outdone any similar vehicles.

Just days before his announcement at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, Cameron tested his one-man submersible vessel, "The Deepsea Challenger," by diving over four miles into the New Britain trench near Papua New Guinea, breaking the world record by similar vehicles by more than a mile.

The director of "Titanic" told the audience, "There’s nothing more fun than getting bolted into this and seeing things that human beings have never seen before. Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff.”

Cameron will not be the first person to have dived into the Challenger Deep.

Over 50 years ago, the US navy sent divers to explore the valley in a small submarine, yet no pictures were taken and the men re-emerged just twenty minutes later.

Cameron, whose expedition is financed by National Geographic, said the dive was purely for scientific purposes.

He said, it would be “very different from going down and planting a flag.”

The expedition will be called "The Deepsea Challenge" and can be followed here.