A new underwater research facility is making waves. Deep, a U.K. ocean engineering company, has installed a subsea human habitat almost 60 feet underwater in the Tennessee Reef, part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Called Vanguard, the habitat allows for four aquanauts to live in a dry environment underwater for five days without needing to resurface. And Vanguard is just the first of a proposed network of underwater habitats by the company.
Aquanaut in the ocean
Deep’s Vanguard is “providing extended access to the ocean for research, conservation and training,” said Deep’s website. The habitat is the “first open-ocean human habitat built, tested and deployed in the United States in four decades,” said Vice.
To install Vanguard on the sea floor, engineers “first needed to install a base foundation and then lower the habitat onto the platform using a boat crane,” said Popular Science. The habitat is “tethered to a surface buoy,” which is a “bright-yellow structure” that “holds multiple vital support services, such as communications arrays, breathable air and power.” Aquanauts are expected to be able to safely use the facility, as it has received the “green light from Det Norske Veritas, an internationally recognized accreditation institution used by oceanographic organizations and companies.”
Vanguard is a precursor for another habitat the company is working on called Sentinel. This habitat would be an “underwater station with direct ocean access, individual suites with showers and toilets, and configurable workspaces, as well as social spaces and communal rooms for meetings and dining,” said Oceanographic magazine. Sentinel will be “complemented by a revolutionary range of submersibles” with “dive and scientific research equipment to cover the full range of ocean depths.” Deep hopes to enable permanent underwater living by as soon as 2027.
Previous dives
Living underwater exploits a “strange loophole in human biology,” said Vice. “It’s like you have been scuba diving for a really long time and your tissues and your blood get saturated with nitrogen, the inert gas that you are breathing,” said Dawn Kernagis, the director of scientific research at Deep, to Science Alert. “Essentially, once you are saturated, you could stay down there for weeks, months at a time.” Those in the facility can leave the habitat using a cord connected to Vanguard’s air supply, allowing for hourslong dives as opposed to the 60-minute limit of recreational scuba dives.
Underwater facilities are not new. They have been used for professions such as underwater welding and in energy and defense industries. The Florida Keys are home to another underwater research habitat, Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has designated the Tennessee Reef as a “research-only zone.” The goal of Vanguard is to allow scientists to conduct marine science research, mainly related to “coral reef restoration, long-term monitoring, climate impact studies, human performance research, and training for extreme environments,” said Deep in a statement. And the deployment of the Vanguard habitat within the marine sanctuary “creates additional opportunities for marine science and builds on research infrastructure.”