Sealab
Sealab was an innovative series of underwater habitat experiments initiated by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s, aimed at enabling divers to live and work beneath the ocean for extended periods without surfacing. The first habitat, Sealab I, was submerged off Bermuda in 1964, allowing four men to stay underwater for ten days, while Sealab II, located off California, hosted multiple teams in 1965 for weeks at a time, with notable missions, including Commander Scott Carpenter’s thirty-day stay. These habitats were designed to overcome the limitations of traditional diving by providing a controlled environment for research on the effects of prolonged submersion.
The Sealab program produced critical insights into the psychological and physiological challenges of living underwater, leading to advancements in saturation diving techniques, which are now extensively used in offshore oil operations. Despite its early promise, the program came to an abrupt halt in 1969 following the tragic death of aquanaut Berry Cannon due to a carbon dioxide poisoning incident. Although there were ambitious hopes for the future of underwater habitats, by the late 1990s, only a few such facilities existed, primarily for scientific research and educational purposes. Sealab remains an important chapter in the history of deep-sea exploration, influencing subsequent underwater research and diving technology.
Sealab
A pioneering undersea living experiment by the U.S. Navy. Teams of men lived days and weeks on the ocean floor at depths as low as six hundred feet.
Origins and History
Deep-sea work has always been limited by the time-consuming process of decompression. As long as divers must return to the surface to eat and rest, their work time is limited by the time required to accommodate pressure changes in the body during each descent and ascent. Sealab was conceived as a way for divers to live and work beneath the ocean without returning to the surface for days or even months and as an underwater laboratory to observe and experiment with the effects of prolonged submersion.
The Sealab series of experiments began in 1964 as part of the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems Project. Sealab I, a forty-by-ten-foot pressurized steel chamber, was submerged 193 feet below the water off the coast of Bermuda. Four men lived in the station for ten days, getting air and electricity through an “umbilical supply line” from a barge on the surface. A hatch in the floor allowed divers to make daily excursions into the surrounding waters for maintenance and experiments. In 1965, Sealab II was submerged 205 feet below the water off the coast of La Jolla, California, and inhabited by three teams for weeks at a time. Commander Scott Carpenter stayed underwater continuously for thirty days. The Sealab program came to an abrupt end in 1969 when aquanaut Berry Cannon died of carbon dioxide poisoning just outside Sealab III because of a missing carbon dioxide scrubber in his rebreather.
Impact
The Sealab experiments produced a wealth of information on the psychological and physiological effects of prolonged submersion in close quarters, underwater construction, marine biology, geology studies, sonic work, and evaluation of thermal protection. This information led to the Navy’s development of saturation diving, in which divers are pressurized in a chamber and transported to depths as low as one thousand feet, primarily for work in offshore oil fields. Instead of staying underwater as in the Sealab model, however, these divers return to the surface inside their pressurized capsules, remaining inside for repeated trips until their work is completed.
Subsequent Events
When the Sealab project began, scientists hoped that divers would be able to adjust to depths of about twenty thousand feet. Peter Benett, a British submarine researcher, discovered that divers become incapacitated below about two thousand feet. Researchers also hoped that underwater habitats for humans would soon become commonplace, but by the late 1990’s, only three existed: a small hotel at a depth of thirty feet in Key Largo, Florida; an educational lab for Scott Carpenter’s Man-in-the-Sea program; and a scientific lab run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at a depth of sixty feet, which accommodates five scientists and a crew member for ten-day missions to study corals.
Additional Information
Project Sealab: The Story of the United States Navy’s Man-in-the-Sea Program (1966), by Terry Shannon and Charles Payzant, offers many photographs and details of daily life in Sealab II. A complete history of undersea exploration from earliest times to the construction of Sealab III can be found in Exploring the Ocean World: A History of Oceanography (1969), edited by C. P. Idyll.