Five uses for subsea human habitats

1. Scientific research from a subsea human habitat

There is so much still to learn about the ocean. We have huge gaps in our understanding of how the ocean sustains all life on the planet, and in our knowledge of the flora and fauna that exists under the waves.

If we focus on just the organic life in the ocean to illustrate my point, Ocean Census, an alliance to protect sea life, recently declared 866 previously unknown species were discovered in just ten ocean expeditions. We’re barely scratching the surface of what there is to discover.

It begs the question of why we know so little.

One, the ocean is vast. It’s the majority of the Earth’s surface. When you think of it in terms of volume, the ocean is an even larger expanse. It makes up the biggest ecosystem of the planet and contains 99% of all habitable space in the world. The scale presents a challenge for scientific study.

But there’s also the question of access, especially at depths that exceed the limit of a recreational scuba dive (around 30 meters).

The deeper you go, the more your body needs to adjust to a new equilibrium. To support this transition, we use special equipment and, at times, breathing mixes that differ from the air we use on land. And the longer you spend at depth, the more the body’s tissues absorb nitrogen, requiring lengthy decompression procedures to resurface. Long story short, it’s challenging to stay underwater for a sustained period. That really zaps productivity for divers and researchers.

A subsea human habitat provides a submerged platform for diving and oceanic research, allowing exploration to happen without the need for repeated resurfacing and decompression.

Experts will tell you that much of the risk in extended diving comes from the repeated cycles of compression and decompression. With a subsea habitat, you go down once and come up once, significantly reducing that risk. This approach dramatically increases "productive bottom time", accelerating scientific discovery and progress. To fully appreciate the boost to productivity, it’s important to recognise that habitats aren’t just a platform for research dives, but can be underwater laboratories.

Let’s say you dive down into the ocean and you collect a sample for analysis. That sample must come up to the surface and be transported to a laboratory. This is time consuming and there is a high probability that the sample degrades in transit, especially where an organic sample decompresses, compromising its molecular structure.

Naturally we’ve seen labs move towards the source, first to the coast, then to research vessels, and now, on the seabed.

Check out the types of scientific research you can undertake on subsea human habitat.

2. Conservation

Human habitats have played a role in ocean conservation, and with advances in habitat technology they have enormous potential to influence future conservation efforts.

I think about subsea habitats and conservation in two ways. The first is their direct application in conservation research and environmental remediation.

The corals and ecosystems that live below 30 meters might tell us about how we can protect and restore shallower coral reefs. A subsea habitat gives us sustained access to those depths to obtain that knowledge.

Or perhaps the work needed to clean up an oil spill could be greatly enhanced by a subsea habitat. The ability for divers to stay safely in saturation without repeated resurfacing could increase productivity and shrink the timeline for such a clean-up.

Recent work in the Gulf off the coast of Florida suggests that habitat-supported saturation diving delivered a fifty times productivity increase in coral restoration when compared to bounce diving.

The second way I think about the usefulness of subsea habitats in conservation is broader.

If you want to conserve something, it means you want to protect it, and in order to want to protect something, you must feel a genuine love and need for it. When we truly understand the ocean and its importance, we are compelled to protect it.

This relies on discovery, information capture, and the dissemination of data. And because the ocean is so diverse, dynamic, and continuous, the opportunities for learning are multiplied when you can sustain a human presence beneath the ocean.

Subsea human habitats have and will continue to help catalyse a shared understanding of the ocean, informing policy, decisions, and innovation.

3. Inverting the aquarium

Building on the notion that subsea human habitats could foster a love for the ocean and drive us to conserve it, here’s a completely different use case to consider.

Growing up, I wanted to be a marine biologist. My imagination was captured, as yours might have been too, through visits to an aquarium, where I was dazzled by the array of life that exists in the ocean.

Rather than take life from the ocean and display it on land, why not “invert the aquarium” and journey into the ocean to see marine ecosystems as nature intended.

This isn’t a new idea. While it’s not a habitat in the same sense as the designs DEEP is engineering, in Eilat, Israel, the Underwater Observatory Tower has a room that sits in shallow water with a shaft to the surface. It means a wider range of people get the opportunity to fall in love with the ocean – not just those capable of diving.

It’s entirely possible for a DEEP habitat to be maintained at one atmosphere (the pressure we experience at sea level) allowing a broader range of people to transfer to the habitat to see the local flora and fauna in its natural environment, and to recognise the ocean’s beauty and criticality.

4. Space analog

Believe it or not, if you want to become an astronaut, you might end up an aquanaut first.

If you want to send humans to space, how can you do that safely and productively?

You select the right people, with the right expertise, and you have the right technology around them.

But those people also need to be well trained and, crucially, mentally fit.

The complex and challenging environment of space requires intense training and preparation, both physically and psychologically. This is especially the case for extended missions, such as stays on the International Space Station.

But it isn’t feasible, cost-effective, or safe for the necessary training and preparation to take place in space.

That means future astronauts must find a suitable analog to simulate the same conditions as space in a controlled setting.

A subsea human habitat can mimic the environmental, psychological, and operational conditions of space missions, particularly those involving extended stays. Space and subsea habitation share some interesting similarities, including many of the life support systems onboard.

Using subsea human habitats to achieve mission success in space is tried and tested. The groundbreaking NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) missions saw astronauts, engineers, and scientists live in the Aquarius Reef Base underwater laboratory to prepare for space exploration.

Incidentally, Dawn Kernagis is a former crewmember and now DEEP’s Director of Scientific Research. You can read about her time underwater here. We look forward to reviving this critical capability.

5. Critical underwater infrastructure

It’s not just marine life that lives beneath the waves. The ocean contains critical man-made infrastructure.

This probably isn’t something you think about every day. We can’t see under the ocean, so it’s likely out of sight, out of mind. So it’s easy to forget how impactful the subsea domain is.

But when you heat your home or make a payment online, the chances are the bottom of the ocean was involved.

A large proportion of the world’s energy resources are transported through underwater pipelines. And internet traffic transits through subsea cables on an astonishing scale – trillions of US dollars’ worth of financial transactions make their way through underwater cables, every day.

Should that infrastructure fail, it would have global repercussions. Even the threat of a potential failure can sow uncertainty, holding back investment and decision making.

Critical underwater infrastructure needs to be protected, maintained and repaired.

Robots and autonomous vehicles have a role to play. But as attention and focus grows on the underwater domain, the need for a sustained or permanent underwater presence grows.

Establishing a permanent presence around strategic areas within underwater infrastructure could be achieved with subsea human habitats.

Complex situations benefit from a human presence, because people can think and act in real time and solve problems. Having a subsea human habitat can increase the effectiveness and productivity of infrastructure maintenance, and shrink the time it takes to go from incident to solution.