Undersea Colonies

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These and the other early underwater habitats had dry interiors, pressurized to match the water pressure outside. That meant a hatch in the floor could remain open without the sea rushing in, and the aquanauts living inside had ready access to the sea outside at any time of day or night. By the Navy had launched Sealab I , 40 feet long and 9 feet in diameter. Equipped like a camper, it had bunks, galley, toilet, shower, and a hole in the floor so that four aquanauts could come and go.

Atlantica Undersea Colony

The first Sealab aquanauts were deployed to the seabed southwest of Bermuda for 10 days at a depth of nearly feet. While all this was going on, Koblick was graduating from college in California and setting his sights on a graduate program in marine biology. That experience convinced him that to truly know the ocean, a scientist had to work in the ocean—or better yet, live in it just as Jane Goodall lived in the jungle to study chimps.

He felt so strongly that he turned down a scholarship to Duke University, putting off graduate school and moving with his wife and young son to the Virgin Islands, where the seawater would be warmer than at Monterey.

The Long, Ongoing Dream of Undersea Colonies

He soon landed a job at the newly formed Caribbean Research Institute and took the lead in establishing an ecological research station at Lameshur Bay on St. A second Sealab trial came in the summer of , this one located off the coast of San Diego. The new habitat, looking like a cross between a submarine and a railway tank car, accommodated three separate teams of 10 aquanauts for two weeks each.

It was followed a few years later by the foot-long, cylindrical Sealab III , which was designed so a dozen aquanauts at a time could conduct experiments at a depth of feet, a giant leap out onto the continental shelf. When a delegation from Washington, D.

Koblick saw his chance to become an aquanaut. He called it Tektite, for meteors that survive their fall through the atmosphere, crashing into the ocean and leaving pearl-like fields of debris along the seafloor. The pitch paid off. Whereas Sealab had a military orientation, Tektite focused on marine biology and geology, and on duration more than depth. Instead of a more common horizontal tank, Tektite had side-by-side vertical tanks, each about 12 feet in diameter and two stories tall, that were mounted on a rectangular base, like upside-down bell jars on a shoe box.

Four divers from the Department of the Interior were selected as aquanauts, but Koblick had argued for a few alternate aquanauts—just in case—and he was soon off to Washington and Philadelphia for physical tests and training to be one of them.

DEPARTMENTS

But the day mission there set a duration record and marked another significant step in undersea habitation. As an alternate aquanaut, Koblick did not get to stay inside the habitat but was in the water every day to help carry out Tektite science projects, especially chasing down lobsters to attach color-coded tracking tags. When Tektite came to a successful end, Koblick was appointed special assistant to the governor of the Virgin Islands for undersea programs and immediately started lobbying the Interior Department to get a chunk of the money needed to bring the Tektite habitat back to the same spot.

It took some doing, but a year later Tektite II was launched. This time Koblick got his wish: For three weeks he and others on the crew set up beacons outside lobster dens, part of a signaling system that alerted them whenever lobsters were on the move. To Koblick it felt as though they were firefighters, leaping into action at the sound of the alarm. Over the weeks of residence, they also studied the fluctuations and migrations of planktonic organisms in the water column, still a focus of research today. Tektite II operated successfully for seven months, through the fall of , housing a total of 53 marine scientists.

But soon after, Koblick and his newly formed nonprofit, the Marine Resources Development Foundation, approached the Puerto Rican government with an idea of his own. Could he help them launch a similar habitat program to size up offshore resources and inventory sea life on nearby reefs? While most habitats had a tanklike appearance, La Chalupa looked more like a barge, about 50 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 10 feet tall. Its hollow interior contained two adjoining cylindrical chambers that could be sealed and pressurized as living quarters.

A ballast system took in and released water to help sink and raise the habitat, which was designed for easy towing. It could house up to five aquanauts at a time for two weeks, at depths ranging from 50 to feet. On a later mission they collected fish to determine their food sources. Koblick himself was a Chalupa aquanaut in the spring of when his mission almost came to a tragic end.

Tour of the underwater habitat

Koblick and his dive buddy, Al Waterfield, a research diver from the University of New Hampshire, were yards from La Chalupa unspooling a transect line, a cord to keep track of their whereabouts. Koblick was wearing a closed-cycle rebreather—a complex piece of gear that could supply breathing gas for longer periods in dives to feet. He took a breath at one point and also sucked in some water: The gear had sprung a leak. To make matters worse, the water was laced with the chemical compound the rebreather used to absorb carbon dioxide, causing a burning sensation in his mouth and throat.

Koblick gave an emergency signal to Waterfield, who went to get help. Meanwhile, Koblick used the transect line like a handrail to pull himself along the seabed, but he felt that the ocean was closing in on him. The coral in his peripheral vision began to blur. His field of vision narrowed, as if he were looking through a telescope.

Before long all he could see were his hands grasping the line in front of him. Then he passed out. Next thing he knew, he was getting slapped in the face. His fellow aquanauts had managed to drag him up through the entry hatch in the floor of La Chalupa and resuscitate him. He sputtered and coughed up water. His throat still burned and he developed a painful ear infection, but he was alive. Before the mission was over, Koblick and the Chalupa crew were struck anew by their front-row view of the dynamic undersea environment.

The four aquanauts were lying in their bunks, looking out a port window as big around as a manhole cover, sipping rum and Cokes—the soda was flat because of their pressurized surroundings. A smattering of small fish and crabs mingled outside on a grassy patch of sand. A gurnard fish entered the scene, using its winged pectoral fins to cruise along the bottom. Out of nowhere a fish the size of an overstuffed golf bag appeared—some kind of snapper, perhaps, though no one was sure. It hovered near the gurnard, moved in, and—slurp!

The big fish started to swim off, then stopped and spit out the gurnard, which hastily swam away. Koblick hoped La Chalupa would open a deep-sea vista for more scientists, but when the Puerto Rican missions ended in the mids after a new round of funding cuts, he could find no other takers for his state-of-the-art habitat. Koblick co-owns and operates the park with his longtime business partner, Neil Monney, a former professor and director of ocean engineering at the U.

The two met during Tektite, and Monney later signed on as a Chalupa aquanaut. The habitat movement might have stalled there, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had Aquarius built in Victoria, Texas, in At 43 feet in length, the tanklike Aquarius , dispatched to the Virgin Islands, could accommodate six aquanauts to depths of feet. But after hurricane Hugo walloped the islands in , Aquarius was moved to the Florida Keys. Its current assignment in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary enables study of the third-largest living coral barrier reef system in the world.

Team leader Chris Martens, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had lived and worked out of Aquarius a half-dozen times before. So had his coinvestigator, Niels Lindquist, a unc marine scientist. Now they were using their days in Aquarius to zero in on the causes of ocean acidification, which may be contributing to the degradation of coral reefs.

Using more than a dozen instruments placed around the habitat, including a first-of-its-kind underwater mass spectrometer that tracks fluctuations in key gases up and down the ocean waters, aquanauts watch readouts in real time on computer screens. Fresh seafood is generally easy to come by on the bottom of the ocean. Aquanauts regularly spear fish and eat plankton, while canned, preserved and dehydrated foods stock the shelves. Cooking underwater, although possible, is usually avoided because of the smells it gives off. Like in an airplane, fumes seem stronger in static air.

Aquarius transports freshwater from the surface, but water could be created using condensation or desalinisation. Depending upon the size of the colony, human waste could be treated and released into the environment, or cooked down to a fine ash. Many marine biologists are enthusiastic about the possibility of being able to live underwater. If we could actually inhabit the bottom of the ocean for 30 to 60 days, imagine the productivity we could get out of researchers down there. An example of the benefits came in the mids when a research group at Northeastern University, Boston, was seeking to understand the basic mechanisms behind the growth and feeding of coral.

They found that doing their tests in a lab introduced all sorts of artificial effects, and that attempts to do them using boat dives failed because using scuba equipment did not give them the two to three hours they needed to set up chambers in which they wanted to produce different sea water flow rates around the coral. Shifting the experiment onto the Aquarius base allowed them to calculate optimal water flow rate for coral feeding.

Underwater archaeologists could take their time resurrecting sunken ships or searching for lost artefacts. Astronaut training has taken place in the existing underwater habitats since the isolated environments can be used to simulate living and working conditions in space. They can also act as broader educational tools.

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Students can visit them, or teachers can inspire them with video lessons from the bottom of the sea. Koblick converted the former La Chalupa research laboratory into the Jules Undersea Lodge as both a luxury hotel and educational facility. There is growing interest in deep sea mining for minerals and metals, especially around island nations such as the Cook Islands, the Seychelles and Tonga. The Chinese in particular have been investing in deep sea expeditions to investigate the viability of mining manganese nodules, rocks that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese, gold and also valuable rare earth minerals.

This work is being done remotely, however if large-scale operations do go ahead they might be simplified by having people continuously on-site at depth, according to Koblick. Then there are those who see underwater living as a way of preserving our species in the event of an apocalyptic catastrophe.


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In the event of a disaster that put paid to human life, communities could perform reverse versions of Noah's ark. With that in mind, Philip Pauley , a futurist and the founder of the London-based visual communications consultancy Pauley, designed the self-sustaining habitat Sub-Biosphere 2. His design includes circular structures that could be floated out to sea and then sunk, creating a haven for 50 to lucky people.

To raise interest and support, he is pursuing various academic collaborations and is looking for a publisher for the first of a planned science fiction trilogy for young adults he has written called The Moral Order, featuring a dystopian future in which the protagonist discovers a hidden underwater world.

Underwater habitat

Larger underwater colonies are already feasible. What stops them becoming a reality is a lack of interest, motivation and funding. However Polish company Deep Ocean Technology thinks tourism is the way to make the endeavour economical. It has signed deals with architects and builders to deliver the Water Discus Hotel at the Noonu Atoll, Kuredhivaru Island in the Maldives within three years. The company is also involved in discussions about building hotels under the waves in Dubai, Singapore and more than one European location, including in Norway.

In fact it won't be much more expensive than a regular night in a hotel, that's the idea. The Water Discus Hotel will be situated 10 metres underwater in order to optimise sunlight, and will include 22 hotel rooms, a bar and a restaurant with views of the surrounding coral reefs.


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    5. Prototypes are under construction. Pauley, on the other hand, believes living underwater is a logical solution to the problem of environmental collapse since it would be cheaper and easier to pull off than founding space colonies. Outside of the realm of science fiction, however, Koblick doubts the life aquatic vision will come to pass. He still hopes that people will come around to the idea of creating new and larger underwater habitats for scientific and educational purposes, but laments that he sees no indication that this will happen within his lifetime.

    Spending more than half his life trying to convince others of the value of longer stays below the waves has convinced him that only a major catastrophe will persuade people to follow his lead. Then it would be done in a heartbeat. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. What is BBC Future?