Picture waking up to overlook a vast ocean from the top of a vessel that's floating vertically in the water. Then to start your work day, you slip on a wet suit and scuba gear to dive into a hole in the floor that leads you to the sea.
Your aquatic destination is an underwater habitat where you have a laboratory and living quarters with 6-foot windows that bring you face-to-face with unhampered sea life.
Florida scientists may soon get to live out this scenario, as they will have access to a floating research vessel and an underwater habitat.
University of South Florida's Florida Institute of Oceanography (FIO) signed an agreement with a private company based out of the United Kingdom called DEEP.
Monty Graham, director of FIO, said they have a common mission: "To provide access to the scientists.”
Floating Instrument Platform
A platform called FLIP, which is shaped like a baseball bat, will be towed out to sea since it doesn’t self-propel.
Once at its desired destination, it’s designed to fill-up with 300 feet of water and then shift upright, floating vertically, leaving the remaining 55 feet above water where researchers will live and work.
The original platform was built in 1962 with funding from the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research and was operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography to understand subtle changes in the currents and the structures of the upper ocean.
Now, Graham said FLIP will be able to help in answering “critical questions” about how moisture and heat impact hurricane intensities, rainfall, and flooding.
“We only understand that air-sea exchange and environment right now, largely, from over long periods of time, largely, from buoys that are out there with instruments … and those instruments are limited,” Graham said.
ALSO READ: USF launches a remotely operated vehicle for deep-sea exploration
“Now we've got the ability to put something out there and really understand that very fine air-sea interaction processes that are going on, and we can be there permanently to understand them.”
But there are also some new things that can be done with FLIP involving communications, essentially to develop analogs to cell phone towers under the sea that talk to different instruments simultaneously while conducting experiments that otherwise couldn’t be done on a ship due to the bobbing up and down.
Sentinel
The researchers will also be able to live and work underwater in a separate submerged habitat called Sentinel for up to a month at a time, while communicating with FLIP.
Both the FLIP and Sentinel can hold about six people comfortably for now.
Graham said keeping the researchers down in the water longer removes a lot of the safety concerns with diving, as you avoid having to constantly compress and decompress the built-up gasses in the bloodstream when swimming up and down multiple times.
“If you have a long-term need to be on a single site … it's better to put people down and leave them down for a longer period of time and then just bring them up once, very carefully,” Graham said.
Graham used coral restoration as an example for underwater projects in Florida waters.
Usually, researchers dive down to collect corals, come back up to bring them into the lab, pulverize them to create little nuggets of corals, and after allowing them to grow for a period of time in the lab they would be taken back down into the ocean.
“The hope is that you can take all of that ‘in and out of the ocean’ part and consolidate it into some activities that are just done underwater all the time,” Graham said, adding that it would be huge efficiency in coral restoration.
DEEP
Florida is a great place to take the first step in this expanded access to the ocean, said Sean Wolpert, president of DEEP.
"Floridians just got it. Universities just got it, right? It was already in their DNA … Oceans in their DNA. It's a peninsula. So, I think that was a very obvious, obvious choice," Wolpert said.
“You can't do things like this alone. And we felt like the team at FIO and in Florida was just the right partners to kind of do that with.”
DEEP is footing the bill to reconstruct FLIP and to assemble the Sentinel system, which will initially cost millions. But Wolpert suspects that once functional, it will be in the tens of thousands to run the operation.
Wolpert said he hopes this pilot program with FIO builds trust in the company’s ambitions.
“Then that starts to bring other interested parties into the circle, and they kind of go, ‘Alright, now I see it. I want one.’ And I think that starts to kind of really bring forward the next era of oceanic exploration,” Wolpert said.
“Marker for success for deep is that in five- to 10-years’ time, we're not the only ones doing this … there are four or five other companies that have sprung up for intelligent access, sustained access, into the sea.”
DEEP plans to have its first Sentinel habitat in the water at the end of this year off the coast of Florida, while getting the modernized FLIP in the water by early 2026.
“Just imagine this: where you've got one off the coast of California, you've got one or two off of the coast of Florida, and you've got one off the coast of Japan. And you then start to drive these exchange programs,” Wolpert said.
“Now, some people might say we should just stay out of the ocean, but we’re already in the ocean. Let's just do so intelligently. Let's help to inform better decisions around the ocean.”
