We’ve know for a while that at least one of the Avatar sequels will deal with the oceans on Pandora, and now James Cameron has dropped some hints about what we’ll see. While a lot of people assumed that his deep ocean dives would translate some how into the Avatar sequels, he tells Coming Soon that it was his SCUBA dives around coral reefs that will inspire more of the Pandora imagery in the sequels:

I hope that explains it, ’cause people have connected the dots directly together. ‘Oh, going to the challenger deep has a direct connection to what we’re going to see in Avatar 2,’ and that’s not the case at all. It’s all the scuba diving I did before I even started the deep ocean stuff that has more of a direct connection to Avatar 2 & 3, which by the way won’t take place completely in or under the water. That’s just part of the environment of Pandora that we’re going to see.

The latest word is that the Avatar sequels may go into production sometime in 2014 with the first movie out the following year, so we still have a long time to wait.