Underwater habitats are buildings underwater where humans can live for long periods and do the majority of daily activities like working, relaxing, eating, taking care of personal hygiene, and sleeping. ‘Habitat’ is typically used in this context to refer to the interior and immediate exterior of the structure and its fixtures, but not to its surrounding maritime environment. Regenerative systems for air, water, food, electricity, and other resources were typically absent from early underwater habitats. However, rather than being physically delivered, some underwater habitats allow for these materials to be generated within the habitat or distributed utilizing pipelines.
Breathing in air of acceptable quality is the most important environmental need that an undersea habitat must meet to accommodate human physiology. Others are related to the physical (pressure, temperature, light, humidity), chemical (drinking water, food, waste products, toxins), and biological (dangerous sea life, microbes, and marine fungi) environments. Divers, diving bells, submersible vehicles, submarines, spacecraft, and other submersible vehicles and submarines all share a lot of the science about underwater habitats and their technology developed to fulfill human needs.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, several underwater habitats have been created, constructed, and utilized all around the world, either by private persons or by governmental organizations. Almost mainly utilized for exploration and study, at least one underwater habitat has recently been made available for leisure and tourism. Research on marine habitats, training for aquanauts and astronauts, and the physiological processes and constraints of breathing gases under pressure have all received attention.
The phrase “underwater habitat” is applied to a variety of situations, including certain constructions that are not entirely submerged when they are in use but have a sizeable underwater component. Submersible boats and underwater habitats may cross paths at times.
Underwater Laboratory
The phrase “underwater laboratory” is difficult to define precisely, it must be included at this point. One can question if Link’s diving chamber, utilized in the “Man-in-Sea I” project, qualifies as an underwater lab. However, because of its degree of maneuverability, the Soviet-designed Bentos 300 is not as simple to categorize. This diving hull might therefore be categorized as a submersible somewhere else. Well, being a little generous can’t hurt.
The behavior of both diurnal and nocturnal creatures can be seen in an underwater habitat at any time. Shallow water habitats can be developed to accommodate divers coming from deeper depths For the majority of the necessary decompression, habitats in shallow water can house divers from deeper depths. The project Conshelf II adhered to this principle. The dangers connected with diving and ship operations at night can be reduced by using saturation dives, which allow for shorter intervals between dives than are possible from the surface. 35% of all dives in the La Chalupa environment were night dives. Eight hours of anticipated daily decompression time would have been required to complete the same amount of meaningful work diving from the surface as opposed to La Chalupa.
Contrary to diving from the surface, sustaining an underwater habitat is far more expensive and logistically challenging. Additionally, it limits the dive to a considerably smaller region.
The history of underwater homes follows the earlier development of diving bells and caissons, and it is also intimately related to the history of saturation diving since prolonged exposure to a hyperbaric environment causes the body tissues to become saturated with ambient inert gases.
Hydro Lab
Built-in 1966, Hydro lab began operating as a research facility in 1970. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contributed to the project’s funding. Four individuals could live in Hydrolab. A total of 180 Hydro lab missions were carried out, including 80 missions off Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, from 1977 to 1985, and 100 missions in The Bahamas between the early and mid-1970s.
The Hydro lab Journal provides a history of these research expeditions. Dr. William Fife conducted physiological tests on academics including Dr. Sylvia Earle for 28 days while in saturation.
The habitat was put on display at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. after it was taken out of service in 1985. As of 2017, the habitat is housed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) building’s NOAA Auditorium and Science Centre in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Edalhab
EDAL conducts engineering design and analysis Students from the Engineering Design and Analysis Laboratory in the US constructed Habitat, a 2.6 m tall by 3.3 m long by 14 tonnes horizontal cylinder. Four students spent 48 and six hours starting on April 26th, 1968.
Nitrox was utilized as a breathing gas in the Edalhab II Florida Aquanaut Research Expedition experiments conducted in 1972 by the University of New Hampshire and NOAA.[24] The habitat was positioned off Miami at a depth of 13.7 m for the three FLARE missions. The habitat now weighs 23 tonnes as a result of the changeover to this experiment.
Helgoland
The Helgoland Underwater Laboratory (UWL) is located in Stralsund, Germany in Nautineum.
An underwater habitat is the Helgoland Underwater Laboratory (UWL). It was the first vessel of its kind ever created for usage in colder waters when it was constructed in Lübeck, Germany, in 1968.
Utilizing saturation diving techniques, divers were able to spend many weeks underwater on the 14-meter-long, 7-meter diameter UWL. After each dive, the scientists and technicians would return to the lab where they would live and work. They decompressed in the UWL at the end of their stay and were able to resurface without experiencing decompression sickness.
The UWL was utilized in the Baltic and North Seas, as well as on Jeffreys Ledge in the Gulf of Maine off the coast of New England, in 1975.[28][29] It was deactivated at the end of the 1970s and donated to the German Oceanographic Museum in 1998. It is now on display at the Stralsund part of the museum, the Nautineum.
Marine Lab
Marine Lab, formerly known as Midshipman Engineered & Created Undersea Systems Apparatus (MEDUSA), was created and constructed at the United States Naval Academy as a part of a student ocean engineering program under the guidance of Dr. Neil T. Monney. MEDUSA was given to the Marine Resources Development Foundation (MRDF) in 1983, and it was put to use in Johnston Atoll in 1984.
The 2.4 by 4.9 meter (8 by 16 foot) shore-supported habitat can accommodate three or four people and is separated into a laboratory, a wet room, and a transparent viewing sphere with a diameter of 1.7 meters (5 ft 7 in). Students have used it for instruction, study, and observation since the outset. It was renamed Marine Lab and relocated to the 9-meter-deep (30-foot) mangrove lagoon at the MRDF headquarters in Key Largo in 1985. The hatch depth was set at 6 meters (20 feet). Wrecks and artifacts placed in the lagoon are there for instruction and training. NASA frequently used Marine Lab from 1993 to 1995 to research Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems (CELLS). Marine Lab is the most often used habitat in the world thanks to these educational and research initiatives.
Under the leadership of aquanaut Chris Olstad, the Marine Lab underwater laboratory ran continuously at Key Largo, Florida, from 1984 to 2018, making it the longest-running seafloor habitat in history. In that period, the seabed laboratory taught hundreds of people and conducted a wide range of scientific and educational research projects, from pharmaceutical development to US military investigations.
REFERENCES LIST:
- Underwater Habitat (2023) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat (Accessed: 28 June 2023).
