In September 1965, two young members of the Bournemouth and Poole Sub Aqua Club on the south coast of England did something that, five decades later, the BBC described as ‘an act of extraordinary, underwater DIY’.
Colin Irwin, 19, and his friend John Heath, 21, made history when they spent a week living in a cylindrical tank 11 metres below the surface next to Plymouth Breakwater.
This was nowhere near the longest stay in an underwater habitat up to that point. Nor was it the deepest.
But there was one aspect of Irwin and Heath’s Glaucus habitat that made it a world first, and which has direct relevance to what we’re doing at DEEP today.
And the two young aquanauts achieved their place in history precisely because they didn’t enjoy the funding and military backing that the big subsea habitat projects of that era had.
I’ll get to what made Glaucus unique shortly. First, I want to put the young men’s achievement in its proper historical context.
There have actually been hundreds of underwater ocean habitats. The book ‘Living and Working in the Sea’ has ten pages of single line entries listing each one.
Obviously I won’t go through them all here. Instead, I’m going to share what I think were the big milestones, the ones that inspire me, and how each one informs the work we’re doing at DEEP.
We start our journey in the Red Sea, off coast of Sudan…
Conshelf: Jacques Cousteau’s underwater worlds
If I had to pick one underwater habitat from history I wish I could have been part of, Conshelf Two would win hands down. Why? Because they did it in a style that’s not been seen before or since.
Typically, pioneering exploits go hand in hand with discomfort. That’s true for mountaineers, polar explorers, astronauts, and it’s been true of the vast majority of underwater habitats so far. Part and parcel of the experience is camping food-style meals and an absence of creature comforts.
Not so on Cousteau’s ‘Starfish’, the main habitat for 1963’s Conshelf Two mission. They ate fresh lobster, sent down in pressure cookers. They drank wine with their meals.
The film ‘World Without Sun’, the Oscar-winning documentary covering the mission, includes a scene where one of the oceanauts helps his colleague back into the habitat after a dive, out of his wetsuit, and then lights a cigar for him.
It was just audacious. French cuisine. French wine. They even had a pet parrot, who they introduced to the parrotfish swimming by the habitat’s window.
Watching ‘World Without Sun’ is one of the things that made me go “Wow, I want to do that!” And basically it’s what we’re working towards at DEEP. Underwater habitats that have good food, comfort, a bit of privacy, amazing dives, and enable learning about the ocean.
I can’t promise parrots or cigars though.
Conshelf Two was the second of three Conshelf missions (short for Continental Shelf Station), which were supported by the French navy. The first, Conshelf One, was in 1962 at Marseilles, France. Albert Falco and Claude Wesly lived ten metres below for a week, demonstrating the concept that humans can live under the sea.
The following year, in the Red Sea, Conshelf Two took things further. As well as the Starfish main habitat, at a similar depth to Conshelf One, there was an aquarium, an equipment shed, and a ‘garage’ for the team’s diving saucer.
There was also another, deeper station 15 metres further down. This meant divers could go to the main habitat, reach saturation – the point at which the body’s tissues absorb all the gases they’re going to at that pressure – and then dive deeper to reach saturation at the lower depth, before coming back to the habitat a few days later.
But as if that weren’t enough, where Conshelf Two really pushed the envelope was the mission’s length. They were down there for a month. This represents proof of concept for us here at DEEP, where we’re designing our Sentinel habitat to house crews for up to 28 days at a time.
Conshelf Three meanwhile demonstrated that habitats work at the kind of depths DEEP plans to put them. In 1965, near Nice in France, six men lived for three weeks at 100 metres below the surface. During that time they worked on a mock oil well, setting the stage for deep sea offshore drilling.
Sealab – the quest to conquer inner space
While the Conshelf missions were gathering knowledge in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, across the Atlantic, America’s answer to Jacques Cousteau was making similar strides for the US Navy.
Captain George Bond, a Navy physician, had been studying the effects of pressure on the human body since the 1950s, running experiments using pressurised chambers.
Bond’s big idea – which inspired Cousteau and his team - was that once a diver’s body becomes saturated, its tissues unable to absorb any more gases, it should be able to stay at that pressure indefinitely without adding to the decompression time at the end of the dive.
It was a perfectly sound idea, in theory. Now someone needed to prove it.
While public imagination at the time was captured by the race to explore outer space, it was also felt that humanity ought to find out more about what came to be called inner space: the ocean.
Bond’s work led to the US Navy’s Man-in-the-Sea project. In August 1962, as part of this project, American inventor Edwin Link spent eight hours in a submersible decompression chamber (SDC) 18 metres below the surface off Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera.
Link became the first diver to be saturated with heliox, a mix of helium and oxygen, while breathing underwater. A month later, Belgian underwater archaeologist Robert Sténuit spent over 24 hours in the same SDC. This was a few days before Conshelf I began, making Sténuit the first aquanaut.
Two years later, in 1964, Link’s second Man-in-the-Sea experiment saw Sténuit and Jon Lindbergh spend 49 hours in a SPID (submersible, portable, inflatable dwelling) in the Bahamas.
During this same period, meanwhile, George Bond was overseeing something even more ambitious, which would cement his legacy as the Father of Saturation Diving.
Sealab I went into the water in July 1964. On 20 July – five years to the day before the moon landing – its four crew members boarded America’s first “proper” underwater habitat (as an aside, we still know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean).
The crew was originally meant to spend 21 days there. But when a storm threatened the support vessels up above, where Bond (a.k.a. Papa Topside) and his team were overseeing things, they had to cut the mission short after 11 days.
A notable aspect of the Sealab missions is they went deep right from the start. Sealab I was at 60 metres, compared to ten for the first Conshelf mission. Sealab II, off San Diego, California in 1965, was 62 metres.
Sealab III, which went in the water in 1969 after a year and a half of delays, planned to go much further, down to a depth of 180 metres. Unfortunately, the mission suffered numerous setbacks.
The fate of Sealab III is a reminder of the risks of subsea exploration, and why making underwater habitats safe is DEEP’s primary focus.
It also spelled the end of the US Navy-backed Sealab programme. However, it was far from being the end of human underwater habitats, as you’ll see in a moment.
Before I get on to what came after Sealab, though, I want to return to our two amateur divers from Dorset, England, and 1965’s Glaucus habitat…
Glaucus – an independent habitat in more ways than one
Glaucus wasn’t a big mission. It didn’t leave a lasting legacy the way Conshelf and Sealab did. Hardly anyone has heard of it, even here in the UK where it happened.
But Glaucus is close to my heart for two reasons. The first is that it happened in Plymouth. That’s only a couple of hours’ drive (on a good day) from DEEP Campus.
The second is that Glaucus was autonomous.
While Conshelf, Sealab, and many of the underwater habitats that came after were supplied with suitable breathing gas from the surface, this just wasn’t an option for amateur aquanauts Colin Irwin and John Heath.
Their budget was around £1,000. Their habitat was built in a friend’s dad’s boatyard. Without the kind of backing that Conshelf and Sealab had, using compressors to pump down breathing gas just wasn’t an option.
So they improvised. Irwin and Heath stayed in contact with the surface using an ex-army wind-up field telephone. A closed-circuit camera allowed their colleagues to monitor them.
And to be able to breathe, they put out soda lime to remove CO2 from the air in the habitat, topping it up with oxygen from canisters. By doing so, they became the first aquanauts to survive in an underwater habitat without air supplied from outside.
We’re looking into this kind of autonomy for Sentinel. Although, with today’s technology, we should be able to make it a lot more comfortable than the cramped, 100% humidity conditions of Glaucus 60 years ago.
Photo credit: The SHIPS Project CIC
Subsea habitats after the 1960s
The 1960s vision of underwater villages that Cousteau in particular had done so much to popularise began to fade in the years that followed. But the concept of underwater ocean habitats had been proven. And their usefulness for divers who wanted greater access to the ocean ensured that other habitats would follow.
La Chalupa (‘small boat’ in Spanish), which operated as an underwater research laboratory from 1971-74, was one example. Designed by Ian Koblick, who later became co-author of the book ‘Living and Working in the Sea’ that I mentioned earlier, La Chalupa employed several innovations based on lessons learned from earlier habitats.
The one I want to focus on its shape. It’s like a barge (hence the name I guess), which made it easier to tow from one location to another.
This ability to redeploy to another location with minimum hassle is something we’re building into DEEP’s habitats too. Combined with their autonomy, this feature promises to make it easier than ever to access parts of the ocean that we currently struggle to get to for any meaningful length of time.
As well as their design, there was another way underwater habitats were evolving in the 1970s.
Much of the research facilitated by La Chalupa focused on marine biology. This was a change from the early habitats, which sought primarily to explore the physiology of living underwater and to prove it could be done. Now, scientists were making using of habitats to get better access to the ocean for the purposes of study.
This idea was taken much further a decade later with the establishment of Aquarius Reef Base, off Key Largo, Florida, in 1986.
Owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Aquarius was operated as an underwater laboratory for more than three decades, first by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and then, from 2013, by the Florida International University.
NASA also used it for training missions from 2001, because the challenges aquanauts face are a good analogue for those that astronauts have to deal with in space. If you want to know what it’s like on a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO), read this account by my colleague Dawn who went on one.
Photo credit: Brett Seymour
The future of underwater habitats
The next chapter of subsea human habitation will build on the research-focused approach of habitats like La Chalupa and Aquarius.
We recently did a study of a project I was part of, where we were at a site for six weeks diving to depths of 70 metres. The dive times on the bottom, doing actual work, were 20 minutes per diver per dive. For those twenty minutes, each of us had to pay a high tariff in decompression time.
We worked out how long the mission would have taken if we’d been diving from a habitat instead. The answer? It would have cut the time from six weeks to three days.
That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing at DEEP. We want to give scientists the capability to do vastly more research than is currently feasible.
And with 21st century technology, we can go much further than the pioneers of the past. We have modern batteries for self-sufficient power. Subsea bladders to supply water and manage waste without it coming into contact with the ocean. And air supply systems that don’t rely on surface vessels or coastal stations for support.
Not only that, but we can also make it more comfortable. The food should be better too – unless of course you were on Conshelf Two with Jacques Cousteau.
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