Longer stays focus of deep-sea exploration

Living beneath the sea has been a dream of explorers for decades upon decades. Stories of Atlantis, Greek myths of Poseidon, comics like Aquaman and films like The Deep have captured our attention since the earliest days. Part of the reason for that is while the ocean is beautiful, it is also unconquered and frightening. To this day, we still don’t have a solid idea of what is in the deep ocean. 

If you ask people like Kirk Krack, an ambassador for the Deep project, the day when humans can live, work and discover on the ocean floor is coming sooner than you might expect. 

I’ve written before how watching Jacques Cousteau influenced my life toward the ocean. In the 1940s, along with engineer Emile Gagnon, Cousteau developed the Aqualung, the prototype of the scuba system we still use today. 

But in the early 1960s, he set out to see if man could live in the ocean. He did a series of tests called ConShelf I, II and III. The first two experiments were in the Red Sea at 10 meters. That is the equivalent of one atmosphere underwater — or two atmospheres of ambient pressure. The third experiment was at 100 meters where the six men lived for three weeks and worked on a simulated oil well. 

One problem living at that depth is your body gets saturated with nitrogen equivalent to the pressure of the water outside. At 100 meters, that is 11 times the pressure at the surface. It took days to bring those six men back to the surface. They had to carefully, and slowly, let that built up nitrogen offgas and return their bodies to ambient pressure on land. 

In the 1970s, Dr. Peter Bennett, the founder of Divers Alert Network, undertook a series of dry dives in a hyperbaric chamber to study the breathing gasses necessary for men to work effectively at depth and reduce the amount of time they had to decompress. 

Those experiments were called the Atlantis trials. Bennett and the rest of the team at Duke University were able to describe things like High Pressure Nervous Syndrome, below 500 feet of pressure (a major plot point in The Deep which he consulted on), began using trimix with helium (something technical and commercial divers use every day for deep ocean exploration and construction) and were ultimately able to take three volunteers to the equivalent pressure of 2250 feet (685 meters). And then return them safely to the surface. 

When I worked at DAN, the organization had a close working relationship with the Duke Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology (CHMEP). I worked with Bennett for several years and was able to visit the hyperbaric chambers several times. The Golf chamber where the three men stayed at that depth is tiny. I remember Bennett telling me the men only wanted soft foods because their breathing gas was so thick, they really couldn’t chew for any length of time before they felt like they were suffocating. The crew would lock food into them, but they couldn’t handle steak. 

More videos here.

More recently, Fabien Cousteau stayed in Florida International University’s Aquarius habitat for 31 days at 63 feet near Key Largo on the 50th anniversary of his grandfather’s Conshelf II expedition. He stayed one day longer and nearly twice as deep while conducting experiments and public outreach. 

Not that there was anything illegitimate about Cousteau’s work, but I got the idea for a story in the Withrow Key short story series called Life Under The Sea from his project. 

In the summer of 2023, Dr. Joe Dituri lived in the Jules Verne Undersea Lodge for 100 days. That lodge is about 22 feet deep. Dituri was able to swim into the lagoon and conduct science experiments on how his body was handling exposure to pressure. He was also able to keep up a regular schedule of public outreach and education. 

Based on his experience, Fabien is working with the Proteus group to establish a deep ocean research station near the Caribbean Island of Curacao off the coast of Venezuela. It’s a beautiful island and the diving there really is spectacular. I look forward to seeing how that project progresses.  

A competitor to Proteus, Deep’s Sentinel project is another effort to create a deep ocean research station. It will be modular and able to be moved from location to location. Like Proteus, Sentinel will be pressurized to the ambient pressure of the water outside using specialized breathing gasses like Bennett developed in the 70s. That will allow aquanauts inside to swim outside and perform research and experiments whenever they want.

Like with the previous research, the diver’s bodies will be saturated and will have to very slowly ascend to the surface pressure inside a separate chamber to avoid a catastrophic case of the bends — decompression sickness. But while they live at depth, leaving the station, swimming around and returning to the station causes no direct harm. With one exception. Long term exposure to breathing high concentrations of oxygen can trigger oxygen toxicity, irritating lung tissue and making it hard to breathe. 

Kirk Krack is a noted diver and freediver who is working with James Cameron on the underwater work for the Avatar series of films. He is also a program ambassador for Deep.

“So why have we picked the oceans? We definitely want to better understand climate change. That's one of the biggest things in our time that is facing humanity,” he said. “That is affecting biodiversity loss. The ocean census program is trying to find 100,000 new species in the next decade, because right now, we know less than 20% of all that lives in the ocean.” 

The advantage of living underwater is increasing the time and access scientists have to the deep ocean. Krack explained that the Deep project anticipates facilitating discoveries for cures for cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. 

“There are current methodologies of exploring. We have huge ocean vessels that cost $250,000 a day,” he said. “We drag the bottom, throw it on the deck of the boat, sift through the muck and the dead animals. In the end say this is what the ocean is made of.”

The issue is time. 

“We use scientific submersibles, but we tend to go straight to 500 feet and deeper. We're behind an acrylic dome, we have a short period of exploration time. It’s longer than diving but a short period of exploration time. We have ROVs and UAVs. And again, you're talking about joysticks and television screens,” Krack said. “I watched a video recently of a pilot and the manipulator operator for five minutes positioning themselves to get on the sample they want, to have the manipulator hand, simply crush it. A diver would have gathered those samples, five of them and been on to the next site.” 

Living underwater comes with its own challenges, of course, but not having to worry about decompression and returning to the surface afterward makes working down there much more practical. A dive to 100 meters using specialized gas mixtures might still require hours of decompression for a relatively short bottom time. 

“It would be the same as if all we knew of the Amazon forest was we helicoptered in through the canopy to the floor, spent 20 minutes there and then back to the helicopter and back to base. Right?” Krack said. “All we know of the Amazon is because we've gone into it, pitched a tent for 60 days, spent 12 hours a day hiking through and sampling.” 

Krack explained that if you're at 150 meters, it's about the same six days decompressing to get out of there, and it allows you that unlimited time. It doesn’t matter if you are at that depth a day, a month or a year.

Krack also gave me a virtual tour of the plans for the Deep project. I’ll share more of that next week.

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