Rendering by Yves Bhar/Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center

Jacques Cousteaus grandson is pushing for the construction of a real-life Sealab 2021. The proposed undersea laboratory is so foreign to our idea of marine studies that its being likened to a space station thats also under the ocean.

The station is named Proteus, not for the changing nature of matter (like a new uncuttable material with the same name), but for the shepherd of the sea. By placing a station 60 feet underwater around the Caribbean island of Curacao, sponsoring Northeastern University says it can reduce divers high amount of overhead time and reduce the danger of nitrogen-induced health effects.

If research divers can live on a facility at the same depth they plan to study, they can dive in and out without needing to make depressurizing pitstops and the other precautions that protect their health. That means with just one adjustment at the beginning and one at the end, researchers can spend weeks making hands-on exploration and research their full-time job.

While Sealab 2021 is an obvious joke, stations like this do already exist. Many of the researchers involved in Proteus also studied in a facility called Aquariusthe zodiac water sign representing a constellation named for a person carrying water. Northeastern University sponsored a 31-day mission at Aquarius in 2014.

Mark Patterson, associate dean for research and graduate affairs in Northeasterns College of Science, is a seasoned diver with nearly three months of living under the ocean in these conditions. He says in a statement:

The plans arent finalized by any means. Theyre ambitious and will require a multidisciplinary team of researchers and funding partners. But the scope of their ambition is part of the appeal. Although the designs are not set in stone, it is planned to be four times larger than any previous underwater habitat, with space for research labs, sleeping quarters, an underwater greenhouse, and a video production facility to livestream educational programming, Northeastern says.

This idea sounds ambitious, but not revolutionary or anything ... right? Its a laboratory under the water. People stay in it. But in the nearly 60 years since the first underwater habitat of this kind, Poseidon Resorts explains, there have been just 70 total ambient pressure habitats. Just two operate today, the Aquarius facility (run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the iconic kitsch masterpiece Jules Undersea Lodge.

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Jules, named for Jules Verne of course, began life as a modular undersea laboratory for study in Puerto Rico. Since then, its spent decades as a single hotel room kept at the bottom of relatively shallow waters off Key Largo at the top of the Florida Keys. Guests dive in and approach from the bottom, a familiar setup to viewers of SeaQuest.

By comparison to the ambitious plans for Proteus, Aquarius and the much-earlier (and originally named) La Chalupa help to form a timeline of research facility progress. Researchers broke the world record for time lived underwater in a building at Jules in 2014. Hopefully, some brave and well-trained new researchers will be able to take the plunge soon.

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How About a Space Station at the Bottom of the Ocean? - Popular Mechanics