Tag: explorers

Happy Birthday Amelia Earhart!

Amelia Earhart is honored by Google with a birthday Doodle.

One of the world’s most famous pilots, Amelia Earhart was one of the first female pilots who sought to break endurance records and prove women pilots were just as tough and capable as the men. In 1937 she took off from Papua New Guinea in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by following the equator.  She disappeared then, and her body was never recovered. However, she was still an important figure in aviation, perhaps more so than any living pilot might have been. And now, Amelia Earhart has found herself on a Google Doodle.

Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Kansas, but didn’t take her first flight until 1920 in Long Beach, California. Earhart was instantly smitten with flight and dedicated herself to her new career; within two years, she was breaking aviation records and by 1927, she flew across the Atlantic.

The Google Doodle shows Earhart climbing into a Lockheed Vega 5b, the plane that made her famous. She joins artists, authors, musicians, and scientists in the pantheon of people who have gotten their own Google tributes.

James Cameron Goes To The Lowest Spot On Earth!

 

James Cameron boldly goes where no man has gone before.

The brilliant director, who gambled big on Avatar and ended up making one of the most successful movies of all time, has an obsession with the ocean.  Between Titanic and The Abyss, the dude just loves the ocean for whatever reason.  This love of water extends to his personal life as well, as the director and a group of scientists constructed a specially-made submarine, the deepsea challenger, for a specific purpose.  James Cameron wanted to dive to the deepest point on earth, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, and he was successful in this attempt.  That’s right, movie director James Cameron set a record with the deepest solo submarine dive in history.

“It’s so exciting — every second you see something cool or you’ve got something to do or you’re photographing or you see some amazing fish,” Cameron told CNN earlier this month, before his attempted dive.  ”You know, there’s so much we don’t know.  I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to study the ocean before we destroy it.”

The spot Cameron visited was 35,800 feet below the surface of the ocean, and has only had two previous visitors before.  In 1960, US Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard sank to this depth in a two-man sub.  Cameron is the only person to hit this depth solo, besting noted thrill-seeker Richard Branson in the process and potentially qualifying for a $10-million-dollar X-Prize, though I don’t believe he has hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench yet.