Living Underwater In The Remarkable New Sentinel Habitat

14.02.2024 - 16:27 / forbes.com

A new deep-sea habitat project has been launched by ocean technology and exploration company DEEP, which has announced plans to create a permanent human presence under the oceans by 2027.

The new project focuses on the Sentinel underwater habitat, a submersible habitat offering individual bedroom suites with showers and toilets, completely configurable workspaces, and social and dining areas, with communal rooms included for research. By placing the Sentinel on the ocean floor, scientists and researchers can stay underwater for long periods.

The Sentinel System consists of customizable, and flexible subsea habitats that allow humans to live, work, and thrive anywhere on the Continental Shelf. The focus is to have a multi-generational mission to make humans aquatic, with Sentinel as the first significant milestone along this path.

I spoke at length with Sean Wolpert, President of DEEP about the goals of the habitable launch, “We want to bring humanity back to the ocean,” he said. “It's raising that awareness and highlighting the importance of the ocean, which is the heart and lungs of our planet, responsible for [the oxygen] in at least every other breath you take. Additionally, the ocean's biodiversity is vast, yet our understanding of it remains limited. The exploration and mapping of the ocean are still in their infancy, and the potential applications for healthcare that it holds are significant."

The Sentinel project will allow researchers the ability to live underwater for up to 28 days at a time. This will offer unique access to the world's continental shelves and the deepest point at which sunlight penetrates into the ocean, where it is believed that 90% of marine life is found.

Being able to explore the unknown depths of the ocean will offer scientists the opportunity to observe more closely and understand the mysteries of our oceans. "We can go position the Sentinel at a depth of up to 200m," says Wolpert. "That's the Epipelagic zone where the primary amount of light will come through. Everything below that is twilight and a bit difficult. When we examine the richness of life and biodiversity, we see that a significant portion of this activity occurs within the 200-meter zone near the surface of the ocean. This area is crucial because it is the primary zone where the planet's heat is absorbed and transferred."

Wolpert says all this leads to new scientific discoveries and explorations: "The habitat system of Sentinel is the consolidation of the scientific chain in a single subsea classroom. You can do a lot of your work and research and then do that experimentation in situ. So you do not have to take your samples and put them through decompression, which alters their kind of chemical makeup or