A Quest, a Place All but Forgotten

Just over the horizon, where blue water wells up from the deep, Americans hold open a gateway to the unknown. It is morning. There is a roll to the sea, a steaminess to the air. The sun stings already.

Steven L. Miller leads the way, splashing into the Atlantic from the stern of a work boat. Breaking through the skin of the ocean, we are received into liquid-blue weightlessness. Below, the shadowy contours of a cylinder resting directly on the floor of a coral reef. We descend.

No bigger than a school bus on outstretched legs, the object bristles with pipes and platforms. It is sheathed with yellow-green sea growth as if it belongs here, 50-feet down. But its industrial symmetry and the heavy umbilical that extends to the surface proves it is an intruder from another world--in this case, our world.

Miller levels off and fins nearer. A school of lackadaisical blue chromis fish, camouflaged in shimmering colors of ocean, part and mold around him. A pair of showy sergeant majors flash their stripes and dart away. Everywhere, eyes watch our movements. A steady current carries dust-like specks of plankton across our field of vision as if the entire sea is slowly drifting by.

Down here there is no sound, of course, except the pleasant hiss of the scuba regulator, the gurgle of bubbles from each exhaled breath--and the crackle of pressure equalizing in the ears.

We dip into shadows underneath the superstructure. A slender passage leads inside. There is a grated steel ledge underfoot. Above, artificial light. We rise. Our heads emerge inside a bubble of air. There is sound again. We can breathe unassisted. We unstrap our tanks and masks and fins and ascend three stairs onto a porch.

“Welcome,” says a technician’s voice, echoing in the steel of the air lock. “Welcome to Aquarius.”

Once, some of the most inquisitive minds in the world set out to explore the oceans, not by just diving into them but by building space stations--inner-space stations--where men and women would live underwater. Here they would overcome some of the problems of the “bends” and never run short of air for breathing. They could sleep at night in cozy beds and swim forth at will with fresh-filled scuba tanks. Instead of minutes, aquanauts would have days undersea, and nights too.

At last, humans could see, feel, chart and now begin to fathom the changing life of the sea. Some envisioned these laboratories as the beginning step to colonizing the underwater. For the sake of our own skins, it seemed imperative that we inquire more deeply into the larger part of our planet.

Of the dream, all that remains is this: one gangly steel cylinder, 43 feet long and 12 feet in diameter.

Of the 6 billion people on Earth, just six at a time can live and study the ocean close-up, in a habitat where air pressure is equal to the crushing weight of water overhead. A one-in-a-billion spot where the air is 2 1/2 times as heavy and dense as on the surface.

From two stout view ports, we look out across a blue waterscape about the size of a neighborhood residential lot. This terrain, and this alone, is where humans keep round-the-clock vigil on the undersea.

Small fish glide slowly across the other side of the window, pausing. “The question often becomes, who is watching whom,” says Miller, director of the National Undersea Research Center.

Space Stations --Above and Below

Let’s go back just 40 years.

The industrialized world was inflamed with the idea of exploration. Some people looked to the heavens, others to the sea. Age-old boundaries were about to be penetrated by technology. One year before Russian Yuri A. Gagarin became the first human to escape the atmosphere, Frenchman Jacques Piccard propelled the bathyscaph Trieste to the deepest spot on the ocean floor, 35,800 feet in the Marianas Trench.

Visionaries planned space stations above and below to extend human reach into forbidden places. One was the grand dreamer Jacques Cousteau. In 1962, he assembled a team to live 40 feet underwater off Marseilles in a chamber called Conshelf One. He saw a turning point for humankind:

“The gist of my life’s work had been to free man from the bondage of the surface, permit him to escape beyond natural boundaries. . . . Now he was beginning to live in the ocean. . . . Men of a new kind were beginning to evolve . . . a species of man would come--men-of-the-water, creatures of inner space.”

Beginning in 1964, the U.S. Navy launched its own inner-space stations, called Sealab. The third launch in the series took humans to an underwater capsule 600 feet deep. A diver perished and the program was scrubbed in 1969.

Undersea Research Director Steven Miller studied the history of these pioneering explorations. He counted 65 programs worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s, some of which achieved “remarkable success” advancing the know-how of underwater habitats.

Then, without much conscious debate or sober reflection, they began to die out. The race for outer space became the single-minded obsession of technological nations. Money, energy and public interest went toward the heavens.

Why? It’s a question which continues to absorb marine scientists when they gather in their faculty lounges and in wardrooms of research ships.

NASA is probably the primary reason. Following the lead of the Soviets, the U.S. consolidated its space program into a single national agency. Money flowed in and publicity flowed out. Public awareness grew as did political support. It became a self-perpetuating cycle.

Nothing similar occurred for ocean exploration.

Then too, the ocean did not produce enough human heroes and popularizers. After Jacques Cousteau came--well, who? There were no Carl Sagans, no John Glenns to speak for the seas.

Perhaps something else was at work too. From the 1970s onward, environmental consciousness in industrialized nations rose sharply. Millions of people began to recognize the limits of resources and the consequences of pollution.

Suddenly, the idea spread that the oceans were being spoiled. Who wanted to explore our human garbage dump, stripped of its plentiful fish? By contrast, outer space remained untouched and clean.

So Aquarius now stands alone on the undersea frontier.

Launched in 1993, the lab is four miles offshore at a place called Conch Reef, where the shallow corals of the Florida Keys drop into the deep blue of Gulf Stream eddies. The 81-ton capsule is operated as a joint effort of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Hardly a year passes when the program does not have to fight for its $1.3-million budget.

Even Chocolate Tastes Bland

“Try whistling,” says Miller, 47, a dark-haired, boyish PhD with a mischievous grin.

Pssssffft.

I cannot whistle inside Aquarius. My voice sounds strangely squeaky and high-pitched. Food, even chocolate, tastes unexpectedly bland. Jars are wrapped in tape should the glass implode on the way down. A fresh can of soda pop has not a hint of effervescence.

Just as weightlessness characterizes outer space, pressure defines human explorations beneath the sea.

Some of the effects are easily discerned, like the press on the eardrums. Others are more subtle, and dangerous.

As scuba divers know, visits underwater are restricted by more than just the amount of air they can carry. Inside Aquarius the air is equal in pressure to the surrounding water. That means the air is compressed. At this depth it is 2.5 times denser than on the surface. With each breath, a person takes in 2.5 times as much oxygen as someone swimming 50 feet above. Also 2.5 times as much nitrogen--the inert gas that makes up most of our atmosphere.

At 50 feet, the body can throw off the excess oxygen. But the blood rapidly absorbs nitrogen. That itself is not harmful. At least until one rises back to the surface.

If there is too much nitrogen in the blood when pressure is relieved, the human body becomes something like a bottle of champagne. Reduce the pressure (by removing the cork or jetting to the surface) and bubbles materialize and fizz. In the bloodstream, this causes excruciating pain, tissue damage and even death. Victims double over in anguish, hence the common term for the malady: the bends.

So, to assure that the body does not load so much nitrogen as to form these bubbles, normal divers are limited to staying one hour and not a minute more at this depth. Miller and I eye our watches.

However, there is another option. Let the body accumulate all the nitrogen it can. Become saturated. Stay down as long as you want. Venture out with scuba tanks, recharging them from “fill-up” stations placed handy, and swim for nine hours. Eat dinner, go to bed, and swim again tomorrow. Just don’t go to the surface where excess nitrogen becomes a problem.

That’s the way aquanauts live for 10 days at a spell.

At this moment, none is home, save a technician. One team has packed up and left. Another is preparing a mission. For scientists, or just casual observers, Aquarius offers remarkable opportunity. Imagine studying a mountain forest, for example. What if you could visit for only an hour? How much less would you learn than if you could camp out among the animals and flora for days at a time?

The secret to surviving these underwater conditions is, at the end, to reduce the pressure slowly so that nitrogen is expelled through the lungs without forming dangerous bubbles in the blood. It’s like taking the cork out of the champagne bottle very carefully.

In the case of aquanauts, this process takes about 17 hours. Aquarius becomes its own decompression chamber for the four scientists and two technicians aboard. It remains fixed in place, and the air inside is incrementally reduced in pressure to match the surface. Then the crew enters an air lock, dons scuba tanks and swims up to a waiting water taxi. Aquarius is then re-pressurized to receive the incoming crew so they can begin the process of saturation diving.

‘Canaries in the Cage’

“I fear that coral reefs really are the canaries in the cage for the changes humans are inflicting on the planet,” says Miller.

Using Aquarius, scientists have advanced our understanding of troubles that reach around the world. University of Houston researchers first confirmed that ultraviolet rays from the sun penetrated the sea deeply enough to damage and kill coral. That’s potentially significant if depletion of the Earth’s ozone shield results in more UV rays reaching the tropics. Other researchers report progress in learning how corals colonize, which may help in restoring damaged reefs. Also in deciphering how microscopic corals actually feed, an important step in deciphering how pollutants may affect their food supply.

But there is another argument oceanographers voice for projects like Aquarius: the old-fashioned magic of exploration.

Living in the sea, says Miller, gives humans “a sense of belonging in the world beneath the waves and a kind of empathy with its creatures. It represents something about the human condition, our need to discover. These aquanauts are out here at the edge, literally. They are specks of humanity on the frontier. And as it is, we’re just sticking our toe into the ocean. There is so much more to explore, so much more that we need to know.”

Perhaps the public mood is changing now. Cities everywhere are building civic aquariums as tourist attractions, bottom-line proof of our growing fascination with the sea. Dan Basta, director of the National Marine Sanctuary program, which relies on the scientific studies from Aquarius to manage America’s underwater reserves, holds the dream of expanding the program with three more undersea labs.

One might be located in deeper water on the East Coast, another anchored on the West Coast and the third could be mobile. In cooperation with NASA, the scientists of NOAA also are designing unmanned underwater satellites, like cruise missiles, that would scour the ocean for information and return it home.

Meanwhile, Miller and his team contemplate opening up the undersea to people other than scientists. Perhaps a crew of filmmakers and musicians will be allowed to set up camp in Aquarius to help popularize the underwater experience.

“The ocean,” he says, frowning, “just doesn’t have many advocates.”

Like Peering Into a Camp Trailer

Nitrogen is building up inside our bodies.

Miller and I take a final gaze out the view port into the neighborhood. Is there any blue as pure and lovely as in the tropical ocean? Any creature as showy as a tropical fish? Is there any place so quiet, so forbidding, but so inviting at the same time as the undersea?

Aquarius’ on-duty technician follows us back to the entry porch. We look into the water. A 3-foot grouper cruises underfoot. We slither into our wetsuits and shoulder our tanks. We bite on the rubber mouthpieces of our regulators and slip back into the ocean.

Here with the fish, we peer back through the view port. It’s like looking into a camp trailer. Bunk beds, stainless steel table, microwave, fridge, trash compactor, toilet and shower.

We swim through a scudding school of purplish creole wrasse. These 6-inch fish always seem to be frolicking at play. Miller has told me different. By long observation, it is now understood that the wrasse are perpetually involved in mating games. There is so much of the ocean that cannot be discerned at first glance.

The gentle current below becomes a wave surge as we near the surface. Aquarius fades into just a shadowy silhouette. Then there is sunshine and noise and airplanes overhead and boats on the horizon. The graceful buoyancy of our scuba equipment becomes unmanageably heavy and cumbersome.

An engine starts. We move away. The large buoy that contains air compressors and generators for Aquarius shrinks on the horizon.

“Every time I leave this place I have the same feeling,” says Miller. “I think of the people that live down there, all alone now. On the very edge of the human frontier.”