Aquarius … Sinking

July 9, 2009

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“Over the next two-and-a-half months, a team of scientists and marine engineers will complete the installation off British Columbia of NEPTUNE Canada, the world’s largest and most advanced cabled ocean observatory. Using three ships and at least one ROV, the team will lower five thirteen-ton nodes and more than four hundred instruments and sensors to the seafloor where they will be attached to n five hundred mile loop of powered fiber-optic cable laid in 2007.

“Led by the University of Victoria, NEPTUNE Canada pioneers a new generation of ocean observation systems that—using abundant power and the Internet—provide continuous, long-term monitoring of ocean processes and events, as they happen.”

“This is truly transformative science,” says Dr. David Turpin, president of the University of Victoria. “At a time when our understanding of the oceans is clearly becoming more essential than ever, NEPTUNE Canada will play a leadership role in advancing our knowledge of the oceans in ways not previously possible. We are launching a new era of ocean exploration.”

Reading this in the news online this morning reminded me of a dive I made fifteen years ago off Key Largo, Florida, to visit what was then the cutting edge of “live-aboard” underwater research stations. Called AQUARIUS the eighty-one ton, school-bus yellow “habitat” – it looked like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a double-wide trailer anchored to the reef – was home to five marine biologists who could stay comfortably one hundred and twenty feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean for up to two weeks.

AQUARIUS, at sixty feet below

I went down for the maximum time allowed a visitor, one hundred minutes, before risking what the scientists jokingly called “fizzing” (the bends). At the time it was the world’s only underwater laboratory. Connected by an umbilical cord to a barge on the surface, which delivered air and electricity, it was a forerunner of NEPTUNE (it had been preceded by the HYDROLAB and the ALVIN, which was used in the discovery of the “Titanic.”  Once-acclimated to underwater living, its scientists could spend up to nine hours diving each day they were under, then more than six times longer than they would if they’d been surfacing each day.

A project of NOAA, administered by the University of North Carolina Wilmington, AQUARIUS was when I visited being run by thirty-year-old Steven Miller. “When you’re down under for that kind of time you begin to tune in differently,” he told me. “Each day is literally like tuning into a different channel on the television. The scenery changes constantly. So does the way you see the sea.”

Frenchman Alan Hulbert was living in AQUARIUS when I dove down off the Florida Keys and entered via a horizontal porthole into a “wet porch,” a three-by-four foot room open to the sea. I popped into the air cavity, which smelled like a funky locker room, on day four of a ten-day mission. Hulbert looked at me through a porthole and using hand signals walked me through the process involved in entering the station. “What we know from our work with AQUARIUS is that we know every little about the ocean,” I remember Hulbert saying to me.

AQUARIUS is still hard at work.

Since I visited – it was1994 – we’ve learned a lot about the ocean, its reefs, its floor and marine life. But there’s obviously still much to discover. This, from NEPTUNE’S press release, sounds very familiar despite the passing of years; the exact sentiment was in the announcement of the AQUARIUS: “Observations will have wide-ranging policy applications in the areas of climate change, hazard mitigation (earthquakes and tsunamis), ocean pollution, port security and shipping, resource development, sovereignty and security, and ocean management. Its cutting-edge technologies are already generating commercialization and job creation opportunities.”

One big change? NEPTUNE’S divers will be able to read this blog on the Internet, two miles below the surface of the cold Pacific Ocean.