Saturday, May 6, 2023

 Jacques Cousteau’s grandson is building a network of ocean floor research stations

(Popular Science, March 2, 2022)

Link to article here.

When I was in high school, my biology teacher Mr. Kramer sometimes played short films from the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I even got to run the projector! Watching the ocean research and hearing it narrated by Rod Serling (and sometimes Jacques himself) was a surreal experience. Later in life, I joined the Cousteau Society to learn more. Unfortunately, that was back in the pre-internet days, so all I really got was an infrequent (but nicely made) multi-page pamphlet. Now, it's entirely online.

I also learned later in life that it was Jacques Cousteau who had actually invented the equipment needed for underwater diving in 1942. He called it the Aqua-Lung (water lung), but the first recorded use of another name -- scuba -- came 10 years later. In case you've ever wondered, that commonly used word now used to be an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Read here for more on the history of scuba diving.

Photo from DeepBlu.com

Now, as Popular Science reported, his grandson Fabien Cousteau continues the tradition of undersea exploration with a proposal to build an underwater habitat. Named Proteus, it would serve like the International Space Station (ISS) but in the ocean, and instead of astronauts ("star voyagers"), it would have aquanauts ("water voyagers"). 

Photo from Smithsonian Magazine

But, Fabien's concept is actually 60 years old; his grandfather Jacques pioneered the first attempts in habitats called Continental Shelf Stations One and Two (Conshelf One and Two) in 1962. The first had 2 divers live 12 meters down for 2 weeks, and the second had 10 people living 10 meters down for a month! You can watch an acclaimed hour and a half  documentary World Without Sun made about them in 1964; if you don't understand French, just turn on the subtitles and change the language. American habitats Tektite I and II were built in 1969 and 1970 by General Electric the the US Department of the Interior, and they expanded on the underwater research (and length of time). Here's a link to history of underwater habitats.

Fabien Cousteau spent a month in 2014 (hence the name, Mission 31) in the last existing station of about 60 underwater habitats, the Aquarius, built in 1986 by the US Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can watch a 4:33 video from NOVA where one of the aquanauts explains and shows how it works. Her excitement is contagious, and her story of meeting up with a goliath grouper fish is fascinating!

Photos from NASA.

The most important point of these habitats is that by allowing the aquanauts' bodies to adjust to underwater pressure, they can swim and explore for 9 hours a day, compared to just one hour that a diver can muster starting from surface. The habitat divers' bodies are under 3 atmospheres of pressure, so returning to the surface is a slow process. Their blood had been saturated with air, which is ~80% nitrogen, so a sudden trip to 1 atmosphere is like opening the seal on a balloon. If the change in pressure happens too fast, the nitrogen bursts out of the blood into bubbles instead of seeping out safely. Bubbles of gas in the bloodstream and other body tissues are extremely painful, and as they migrate to major joints like knees or elbows, the pain causes a person to bend over in agony. That's why decompression sickness is commonly called the bends. If you plug the tip of a syringe that has water in it and pull back on the plunger, you reduce the pressure inside in a similar way, and you can actually see the water boiling even at room temperature.

Fabien's habitat Proteus won't be deep enough to pressurize the inside environment, just 20 meters down. The younger Cousteau plans to make it modular like the ISS to make it easier to upgrade, unlike the Aquarius. It'll have a hydroponic garden, sleeping quarters, labs, and a communications room, The Proteus will not only be connected to the surface but also to another "satellite" habitat >3 times deeper nearby at about 70 meters deep! Here are some illustrations of the proposed design from the project website to show how modules are connected. Cousteau also hopes to have a docking section to allow submarines to park. They can either transport supplies or take the divers on more extended day trips.


So, what's the point of an underwater habitat? Well, ninety-five percent of the oceans have not been explored. Proteus will research a wide range of ecosystems, do selective coral breeding, observe climate change patterns, measure quantities of microplastic pollutants in the water, look at new species, and more. Cousteau envisions many stations like Proteus around the world, not just in the Venezuelan waters where he is setting up "home, wet home" right now. Instead of (or should we say, in addition to) exploring outer space, these habitats will allow humankind to stay home and explore inner space.

For more, here is a link to a history of scuba diving.

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