Florida researchers could soon live and work under water

Wake up the picture to overlook a huge ocean from the tip of a ship that hovers vertically in the water. Then to start your working day, slip on a wet suit and a diving to dive into a hole in the ground that leads to the sea.

Your aquatic goal is an underwater habitat in which you have a laboratory and residential area with 6-foot windows, which you can face face with unhindered sea life.

Florida scientists can soon live out this scenario because they will have access to a floating research ship and an underwater habitat.

The Florida Institute of Oceanography (FIO) of the University of South Florida signed an agreement with a private company from Great Britain called Deep.

Monty Graham, director of Fio, said they had a common mission: “Access to the scientists.”

Floating instrument platform

A platform called Flip, which is shaped like a baseball bat, is towed at sea because it is not a trial itself.

Once at the desired destination, it was designed so that it fills with 300 feet of water and then swims upright and vertically and the remaining 55 feet above the water where researchers will live and work.

The original platform was built in 1962 with funds from the US marine agency for naval research and operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to understand subtle changes in the currents and structures of the upper ocean.

Now Graham said that Flip would help to answer “critical questions” how moisture and warmth influence the hurricane intensities, precipitation and floods.

“We only understand that the Air Sea exchange and the environment are currently primarily equipped by Boejen from instruments … and these instruments are limited,” said Graham.

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“Now we have the ability to put something out there and really understand these very fine Luft-Sea interaction processes that are going to go, and we can be there permanently to understand them.”

However, there are also some new things that can be carried out with flip with communication in order to develop essentially analoga to cell phone turrets under the sea that also speak to various instruments while carrying out experiments that are otherwise not up due to the growth A ship could be carried out and down.

Sentinel

The researchers will also be able to live and work under water for up to one month in a separate, submerged living space and at the same time communicate with flip.

For the time being, both the flip and the Sentinel can keep about six people comfortable.

Graham said that the researchers in the water said longer, concerned a large part of the security concerns when diving because they avoid constantly compressing and decompressing the gases built in the bloodstream when they swim up and down several times.

“If you have to be on a single page in the long term … it is better to put down people and let them down for longer and then only call them carefully,” said Graham.

Graham used coral recovery as an example of underwater projects in Florida waters.

Usually the researchers dive together to collect corals, to get back to bring them to the laboratory, to powder them to create small nuggets of corals, and after they had allowed them to grow in the laboratory for a certain period of time back into the ocean.

“The hope is that you can take all of this” in and out of the ocean “and summarize it in some activities that are constantly being carried out under water,” said Graham, adding that this would be enormous efficiency in coral recovery.

DEEP

Florida is a great place to make the first step in this extended access to the ocean, said Sean Wolpert, President of Deep.

“Floridians just got it. Universities just got it, right? It was already in her DNA … Oceans in her DNA. It is a peninsula. I think that was a very obvious, obvious choice,” said Wolpert.

“You can't do such things alone. And we felt like the Fio and Florida team exactly the right partners to do that. ”

Deep takes the invoice to reconstruct Flip and put together the Sentinel system, which will initially cost millions. However, Wolpert suspects that it will be functional in tens of thousands to carry out the operation.

Wolpert hopes that this pilot program will build confidence in the company's ambitions.

“Then it starts to bring other interested parties into the circle, and somehow they go: 'Okay, now I see it. I want one. 'And I think that starts the next era of the oceanic exploration really starts, ”said Wolpert.

“The marker for the success for deep is that in five to 10 years we will not be the only ones who do this. “”

Deep plans to have his first Sentinel habitat in the water at the end of this year on the florida coast, while he will get the modernized flip into the water until early 2026.

“Imagine the following: Where you have one off the coast of California, you have one or two off the Florida coast and you have one off the coast of Japan. And then they start driving these exchange programs, ”said Wolpert.

“Now some people could say that we should just stay away from the sea, but we are already in the sea. Just let us do it intelligently. Let us help you make better decisions about the ocean. ”

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