What scientific research can be done on a subsea human habitat?

1. Studying people

How humans react in challenging environments has long been a research focus of mine. Habitats like DEEP’s Sentinel will enable more people to spend days or weeks under the sea, living at the same pressure as the surrounding water.

These new habitats will provide more opportunities to build on the research that took place on the earliest habitat missions in the 1960s, using technology that wasn’t available back then.

As they become more established, subsea habitats should facilitate larger sample sizes and a more diverse range of subjects for human research studies.

Coupled with the technology we have today for studying humans, including advanced monitoring of human physiology and tools for studying changes at the cellular and molecular level, we will advance our understanding of how humans respond and adapt to living at pressure.

Our new habitats will also have the capacity to conduct processing and analysis of blood or tissue samples at depth, which eliminates any changes to those samples related to the stress and time of bringing the sample to the surface before it’s analyzed.

Also, as a research participant in previous dive medicine studies, I can say that spending time at the bottom of the ocean, watching the marine world go by, was a much more appealing prospect to volunteer for than spending days or weeks in a hyperbaric chamber on land!

This should expand the potential for not only short-term studies, but longitudinal ones that follow people for months or years afterwards to understand the long-term effects of spending time at depth.

Habitat missions can also look at the impact of being physically active in such an environment, including monitoring divers during excursions and doing work outside of the habitat.

I can say from first-hand experience that working on the ocean floor while wearing a heavy helmet can be hard, but rewarding, work! Just like after a long working SCUBA dive, my teammates and I were always hungry for a snack back in the habitat!

There’s so much that we have yet to understand about how humans adapt to living underwater. Habitats like DEEP’s can unlock this knowledge.

2. Studying support systems

We’re also going to learn more about the best ways to sustain human life in an environment that doesn’t naturally support it.

This research will cover everything from maintaining a clean environment and effective communications, to figuring out what kinds of plants you can grow in a habitat as a source of healthy nutrition.

NASA has a long history of using the sea as an analog for space, with programs like NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) preparing astronauts for missions by sending them to live on the Aquarius habitat in Florida.

For example, the NEEMO 21 mission that I was part of included a 15-minute simulated comms delay to mimic the time it would take to send a message from Mars and get the reply.

Our crew was also the first to sequence DNA under the sea, as part of a project to test a handheld biomolecule sequencing device before it was used on the International Space Station.

The researchers wanted to know if it was still accurate at that pressure, and if we could follow protocol as we worked in an isolated environment.

Going forward, I can see undersea habitats being used to test a wide range of new devices and protocols ahead of taking them to other extreme environments.

3. Studying the sea

As well as being able to study what happens in the habitat, researchers will also have much more time at the bottom of the sea to learn about the world outside it.

From biological to geological to chemical and physical measurements, we will have the ability to work on the bottom for extended periods of time and maximize the potential research of the environment surrounding the habitats.

One of the projects I worked on during NEEMO 21 was coral restoration. With the extended time we were afforded on the bottom, our team was able to build coral nurseries and collect data from those nurseries.

Having habitats that can be redeployed from one place to another will also facilitate much more conservation work, like this coral restoration effort, all around the world.

It also promises to transform our knowledge of marine biology and pharmacology, potentially leading to the discovery of lifesaving drugs.

As with the tissue and blood samples that scientists collect for human research studies, having a subsea laboratory will allow us to process marine samples at depth without disturbing them through decompression.