Oceans cover two-thirds of our planet and provide every other breath of oxygen we breathe, yet we know less about their deeper areas than we do about the surface of the moon.
In a quarry in Chepstow – they want to change that. The former scuba diving site is now a hub of cutting-edge engineering owned by a company called DEEP.
The centrepiece is a 60-metre long steel underwater habitat. It’s called Sentinel and hopes to provide a home for marine scientists as deep as 200 metres.
“What we’re trying to do is reconnect humanity with the sea.” DEEPS President Sean Wolpert told me. “This is the alien world that we need to have a better understanding of.
More than half of the oxygen that we breathe comes from the ocean, not our rainforests. To protect it we need to love it. To love it we need to understand it.”
Inside a prototype shell of what will become a Sentinel Simulator, dive lead Phil Short shows me around.
“This hatch would lead to the transfer capsule that enables our crews to be brought down to the Sentinel and at the end of the mission taken back to the surface.”
At the moment, deep dives are restricted to just minutes at the bottom, followed by days of decompressing to avoid the bends.
Living in a capsule where the air pressure matches the water pressure outside, divers can be lowered directly into the water via a moonpool and stay out for hours.
The downside is that the crew have to breathe an oxygen and helium mix, which has exactly the effect on their voices you’d expect.
To withstand the pressure at depth the final structure will be 3D printed from steel. The different capsules can be connected together like Lego bricks. 150,000 hours of engineering have already been put into the project, including a full-scale plywood mock-up to test out living quarters.
Inside, engineering director Rick Goddard showed me the kitchen, six soundproofed bedrooms and two bathrooms.
“Because people will be spending up to a month down here sub sea, it needs to be comfortable, and part of that is it needs to be big. This is a 450m3 habitat and every element of it is designed to be comfortable so that people want to come back as opposed to going home at the end of a mission.”
Being deep under the ocean isn’t cheap. A secretive private American tech billionaire has already bankrolled the project to the tune of £100 million.
Many of the technologies are similar to those used in space. Following Donald Trump’s announcement he wants American astronauts to land on Mars, the Sentinel could make a great training base.
The team says safety underpins everything they do. Whilst it was a different company altogether, everybody remembers Titan – the carbon fibre sub which imploded at depth killing all five inside. DEEP say Sentinel – which is made from steel – is manufactured in a completely different way. The company does not make submersibles.
This metal home should be ready for testing in a couple of years. First in the quarry, then on the ocean floor.
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