Cameron will transfer the vertically-deployed DEEPSEA CHALLENGER to Woods Hole, where WHOI scientists and engineers will work with Cameron and his team to incorporate the sub’s numerous engineering advancements into future research platforms and deep-sea expeditions. This partnership harnesses the power of public and private investment in supporting deep-ocean science.

“The seven years we spent designing and building the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER were dedicated to expanding the options available to deep-ocean researchers. Our sub is a scientific proof-of-concept, and our partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a way to provide the technology we developed to the oceanographic community,” says Cameron. “WHOI is a world leader in deep submergence, both manned and unmanned. I’ve been informally associated with WHOI for more than 20 years, and I welcome this opportunity to formalize the relationship with the transfer of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible system and science platform. WHOI is a place where the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER system will be a living, breathing, and dynamic program going forward.”

Read the entire announcement here.

Honored for the cutting-edge submersible technology that took him to the bottom of the Mariana Trench—nearly seven miles (11 kilometers) below the surface of the sea—Cameron joins a list that includes astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, polar explorer Roald Amundsen, and primatologist Jane Goodall (former National Geographic explorer-in-residence).

Nearly a year after Cameron’s historic dive, he spoke with National Geographic News on what drives him to explore. Read the full interview here.

To kick off a full year of celebrating this anniversary, we gathered explorers from around the world together with public participants for an epic Google+ Hangout to talk with each other about the new age of exploration in which we live. Generations after that meeting of just thirty-three men from across the United States, this event spanned the globe as well as the human experience, and ultimately involved thousands of people watching from their homes around the world as well.

Watch the highlights video here or the full replay here, and see below to learn more about these thrilling explorers and the work they’ve done and will continue to do, and join us as we keep doing what we’ve always done together: explore.

Read the full post here and visit the “125 Years” anniversary site here for photos, videos, stories, and more.

Send in your question for the explorers and it may be asked on air. You may even be invited to join the Hangout and ask your question live. Submit your question by:

• Uploading a video question to YouTube with #NatGeo125
• Posting a question on Google+ or Twitter with #NatGeo125
• Leaving a comment on this Facebook post, or
• Commenting directly on this blog post

Follow National Geographic on Google+ or tune in right here on this blog to watch the Google+ Hangout Sunday, January 13th at 1 p.m. ET (6 p.m. UTC).

Read full Newswatch blog post here.

Fifty-two years after he and U.S. Navy Capt. Don Walsh became the first people to descend nearly seven miles to the Mariana Trench, Piccard, who died in 2008 at the age of 86, will posthumously receive the National Geographic Society’s highest honor, the Hubbard Medal.

It was Jan. 23, 1960, when Piccard, along with ocean explorer Don Walsh, climbed aboard the Navy bathyscaphe Trieste and plunged to the floor of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, the world’s deepest location, some 200 miles southwest of the island of Guam. Their destination was the trench’s lowest point, Challenger Deep, some 35,800 feet below the ocean surface. The only other individual to dive to this depth since then is filmmaker/explorer James Cameron, who reached the Challenger Deep on March 26, 2012.

The Hubbard Medal will be presented to Piccard’s family by National Geographic Society chairman and CEO John Fahey, assisted by Don Walsh—who received the Hubbard Medal in 2010—and James Cameron.

“Jacques Piccard was one of the first two pioneers to visit Earth’s deepest place,” said Fahey. “His accomplishment ranks alongside those of other Hubbard Medal recipients, like Charles Lindbergh, Louis and Mary Leakey, Jane Goodall, and Robert Ballard. The passion and commitment of intrepid individuals like Piccard continue to inspire new generations of explorers.”

Piccard chronicled the dive for an article in the August 1960 issue of National Geographic magazine. He wrote: “Like a free balloon on a windless day, indifferent to the almost 200,000 tons of water pressing on the cabin from all sides, balanced to within an ounce or so on its wire guide rope, slowly, surely, in the name of science and humanity, the Trieste took possession of the abyss, the last extreme on our Earth that remained to be conquered.”

Piccard and Walsh had to sit on small stools for the nine-hour trip down and back; they spent the hours keeping records of temperatures of water and the gasoline (used for buoyancy), amount of ballast released, and water pressure. They kept in contact with the surface for most of the journey via a sonic telephone. When, after four-and-a-half hours, the bathyscaphe finally landed on the ocean bottom, Walsh and Piccard spied a fish, thereby answering a question about the presence of sea life in the deep that thousands of oceanographers had been asking for decades. By proving the existence of life where nobody expected it, the dive pushed governments to ban the dumping of toxic waste into the deepest trenches.

After that historic dive, Piccard went on to build four mid-depth submarines—called mesoscaphes—including the first tourist submersible, which took 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva in 1964. He then built another mesoscaphe for Grumman and NASA to explore the Gulf Stream during a one-month drift mission in 1969.

Piccard, born in Brussels in 1922, studied in Switzerland and worked as a university economics teacher. He left teaching to help his father, Auguste (a physicist and the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere), design the bathyscaphe, a submersible able to take humans to great depths below the ocean’s surface. It was in the bathyscaphe Trieste that Piccard and Walsh reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie/National Geographic

The Mariana Trench is perhaps the most isolated place on the planet. Cameron describes his journey to the Challenger Deep during his most in-depth interview to date: “I was watching the numbers going deeper. The sub slows down as you get to the target depth. There is a long moment of getting to think about it. Then you have to get busy. You have less than a thousand feet from the bottom, you fine-tune the ballast, adjust the camera, turn up the spotlight. As the altimeter counted, I saw the glow of the bottom!”

Read more on Inside NGC

Below is a summary of the expedition to date.

• The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible completed a total of 13 test and research dives off the coasts of Australia and Papua New Guinea and at the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench between January 31 and April 3, 2012. On March 8 Cameron set the record for a single-manned dive to 27,119 feet (8,265 meters) in the New Britain Trench off Papua New Guinea. An expedition lander, or unmanned research vehicle, captured images of an enormous amphipod—the deepest instance of gigantism reported to date.

• Cameron successfully completed the dive to the Challenger Deep on March 26, reaching 35,787 feet (10,908 meters) and making history as the first individual to reach full ocean depth in a solo-manned vehicle. Cameron spent about three hours on the bottom documenting what he saw and collecting samples. During the dive to the Challenger Deep, Cameron reported that the manipulator arm on the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER malfunctioned when hydraulic fluid leaked but that the prototype submersible was a success. Cameron said later: “The sub worked well as a scientific platform, and we learned a great deal. It’s our hope that others will be encouraged to explore and illuminate this new frontier.”

• Ron Allum, chief engineer of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible and Cameron’s partner in the building of the sub, completed a dive to about 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) on April 1 off the coast of Ulithi, an atoll located in the Federated States of Micronesia. He collected samples and documented life at that depth in rare detail. Among his many contributions to the design of the sub and to the ultimate success of the expedition was the invention of ISOFLOAT™, a syntactic foam that enabled the sub to withstand the tremendous pressure of the deep and to remain buoyant and return to the surface in minimal time.

• Chief expedition scientist Doug Bartlett of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, confirms the scope of the scientific material that will be published in peer-reviewed papers in the months and years to come. On test dives as well as the dive to the Mariana Trench, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER collected samples, all of which have been preserved for future study at the on-ship laboratory created by the expedition’s team of seven scientists. “That material and the documentary evidence captured by the sub will keep researchers working in the fields of marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology, and geophysics for years to come,” said Bartlett, a microbiologist. “It’s too early in the scientific process to draw conclusions, but we saw many surprises, like the giant amphipod at about 8,000 meters. And this is only the beginning.” Another scientist on board, Patricia Fryer, a marine geologist from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawai’i, stresses the video data provides evidence of exposures of thick lava sequences at the deepest levels of the New Britain Trench and confirmation of access to intricate slump deposit features at the deep inner trench slope in the Challenger Deep. The latter are consistent with morphology of features predicted in recent publications to be related to major tsunamigenic earthquakes in subduction zones.

• The science team’s work continued until April 4 at the Mariana Trench. A DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition lander was deployed within the Sirena Deep in the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument to a depth of within 656 feet (200 meters) of the Challenger Deep. Video captured reveals a sloping, rocky terrain with a few amphipods seen swimming around the bait. The team has begun processing samples for microbial cultures, amphipod identification, chemistry and genomics/phylogenetics.

• The specially designed Rolex experimental watch attached to the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER’s manipulator arm during the Challenger Deep dive returned unharmed and keeping perfect time. In 1960 an experimental Rolex Deep Sea Special watch was attached to the hull of the bathyscaphe Trieste and emerged in perfect working order after withstanding the huge pressure exerted at 6.77 miles (10.89 kilometers) below the surface. “The Rolex Deepsea Challenge watch is a tremendous example of engineering know-how and an ideal match for the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible,” said Cameron.

The DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition will be chronicled for a 3-D feature film for theatrical release. The film will feature the intensive technological and scientific efforts behind this historic dive and will subsequently be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel. The expedition will also be documented in National Geographic magazine.

But a scant few weeks later, the filmmaker and explorer is eager for himself and project scientists to dive again into Challenger Deep, an undersea valley in the trench that’s the deepest known point on Earth.

For now, however, Cameron and his team are wrapping up what they’re calling Phase One of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex.

“We always planned it in two gos,” Cameron said. “The first [phase] primarily focused on proving and refining the technology, [with] the second one being more science-focused once we had a proven platform.”

Read the full story from National Geographic News here.