Feb 6, 2025 09:34 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 6, 2025 09:57 PM by C C.)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...order-deep
EXCERPT: . . . Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a “permanent human presence” under the sea from 2027.
So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will “increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity”, according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the £100m being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor’s identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.
The 20-hectare (50-acre) site in Gloucestershire was once a limestone quarry that was flooded in the 1990s and used by a dive school until 2022. Now, it is being transformed into a state-of-the-art facility that will feature accommodation units, a training school and a platform for mini submersibles to take people down to living spaces in the 80-metre deep (260ft) lake. These underwater units, known as sentinels, will then be used to train scientists – and eventually anyone else who has the money to rent them – to live under the ocean for much longer than has ever been achieved before, and at a greater depth.
The units can be lowered to 200 metres (656ft) under the sea, which is where the sunlight zone ends and the twilight zone of the ocean begins. Marine life found at that depth includes the kind of creatures most people will only ever see via David Attenborough documentaries and is a place about which we still know very little.
Mike Shackleford, Deep’s chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. “Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you’re up there, it’s a relatively benign environment.” The ocean is the opposite: it’s fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you’re down there, “basically, everything wants to kill you”, he jokes.
“Yet, just about every oceanographer I’ve met says, ‘You’d be shocked at how little we know about the ocean’,” Shackleford tells me. “So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ.”
The idea of Deep’s sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time – though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months … and beyond. “The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world,” says Shackleford.
There have been previous attempts to establish living quarters in the sea. Jacques Cousteau pioneered underwater living in the 1960s, starting with the Continental Shelf (or Conshelf) I, a five-metre long, 2.5-metre wide steel cylinder that was set up off Marseille at a depth of 10 metres. Cousteau went on to develop more sophisticated versions of Conshelf I at locations around the world – funded in part by the French petrochemical industry.
Cousteau eventually abandoned it for a career focused on conservation but underwater habitats remained popular for some time after, inspiring all sorts of experiments, including one by two British teenagers who lived underwater for a week off the coast of Plymouth in a steel tank they had built themselves. The craze to conquer life under the ocean then “dropped off in the 80s”, says Shackleford. “Humanity kind of walked away and went towards outer space.”
Six divers around the porthole of a submersible in ocean. Two people are looking out the window from inside
The last and most sophisticated undersea habitat was the Aquarius Reef Base, five miles off Key Largo in Florida and 19 metres under the surface. Now run by Florida International University, it was built in the 1980s and is the only underwater human habitation still used today, including for the training of Nasa astronauts as part of the space agency’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations’s (Neemo) programme... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/4EpZxVHYuho
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4EpZxVHYuho
EXCERPT: . . . Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a “permanent human presence” under the sea from 2027.
So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will “increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity”, according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the £100m being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor’s identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality.
The 20-hectare (50-acre) site in Gloucestershire was once a limestone quarry that was flooded in the 1990s and used by a dive school until 2022. Now, it is being transformed into a state-of-the-art facility that will feature accommodation units, a training school and a platform for mini submersibles to take people down to living spaces in the 80-metre deep (260ft) lake. These underwater units, known as sentinels, will then be used to train scientists – and eventually anyone else who has the money to rent them – to live under the ocean for much longer than has ever been achieved before, and at a greater depth.
The units can be lowered to 200 metres (656ft) under the sea, which is where the sunlight zone ends and the twilight zone of the ocean begins. Marine life found at that depth includes the kind of creatures most people will only ever see via David Attenborough documentaries and is a place about which we still know very little.
Mike Shackleford, Deep’s chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. “Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you’re up there, it’s a relatively benign environment.” The ocean is the opposite: it’s fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you’re down there, “basically, everything wants to kill you”, he jokes.
“Yet, just about every oceanographer I’ve met says, ‘You’d be shocked at how little we know about the ocean’,” Shackleford tells me. “So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ.”
The idea of Deep’s sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time – though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months … and beyond. “The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world,” says Shackleford.
There have been previous attempts to establish living quarters in the sea. Jacques Cousteau pioneered underwater living in the 1960s, starting with the Continental Shelf (or Conshelf) I, a five-metre long, 2.5-metre wide steel cylinder that was set up off Marseille at a depth of 10 metres. Cousteau went on to develop more sophisticated versions of Conshelf I at locations around the world – funded in part by the French petrochemical industry.
Cousteau eventually abandoned it for a career focused on conservation but underwater habitats remained popular for some time after, inspiring all sorts of experiments, including one by two British teenagers who lived underwater for a week off the coast of Plymouth in a steel tank they had built themselves. The craze to conquer life under the ocean then “dropped off in the 80s”, says Shackleford. “Humanity kind of walked away and went towards outer space.”
Six divers around the porthole of a submersible in ocean. Two people are looking out the window from inside
The last and most sophisticated undersea habitat was the Aquarius Reef Base, five miles off Key Largo in Florida and 19 metres under the surface. Now run by Florida International University, it was built in the 1980s and is the only underwater human habitation still used today, including for the training of Nasa astronauts as part of the space agency’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations’s (Neemo) programme... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/4EpZxVHYuho