Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: laurin bubble bom here. Even though around seventy of our
Speaker 1: planet is covered in salt water, we have a better
Speaker 1: map of Mars than we do of the oceans that
Speaker 1: sustain virtually every living thing on Earth. Sure, ocean exploration
Speaker 1: is expensive and complicated, but so is space exploration, and
Speaker 1: we do plenty of that. There was a time, though,
Speaker 1: during the early years of space exploration, that aquanauts were
Speaker 1: pushing the limits of how deep humans could dive under
Speaker 1: the ocean and how long they could stay down there.
Speaker 1: Sea Lab, a program launched by the U. S. Navy
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty four, was intended to figure out how
Speaker 1: to send divers down into the freezing, high pressure environments
Speaker 1: of the deep sea for longer periods of time than
Speaker 1: anyone had ever thought possible, and the program was a
Speaker 1: big success until it wasn't anymore. It's always challenging to
Speaker 1: get a human body free swimming at any great depth,
Speaker 1: of the reason being that our bodies are not made
Speaker 1: to withstand millions of gallons of water being piled on
Speaker 1: top of us. Divers have to breathe pressurized air, which
Speaker 1: contains inert gases nitrogen mainly, that dissolve into the bloodstream
Speaker 1: and tissues, which works out great so long as the
Speaker 1: weight of the entire ocean keeps them compressed. If a
Speaker 1: diver wants to come up to the surface, they must
Speaker 1: do it slowly in order to avoid the gases making
Speaker 1: little bubbles in their blood, migrating to their joints and
Speaker 1: causing decompression sickness sometimes called the bends, which is unspeakably
Speaker 1: painful and sometimes fatal. In the early nineteen sixties, a
Speaker 1: Navy physician named George Bond figured out how to let
Speaker 1: people explore the ocean in a new way through a
Speaker 1: technique called saturation diving. In his laboratory experiments, Bond was
Speaker 1: able to saturate the blood with inert gases like helium
Speaker 1: in such a way that divers could not only go deep,
Speaker 1: they could stay down indefinitely so long as they had
Speaker 1: the right set up and a shelter. Divers could become
Speaker 1: acclimated to a habitat two hundred feet that's sixty below
Speaker 1: the surface, and free dive even deeper from there. We
Speaker 1: spoke with Ben Hellworth, the author of Sea Lab America's
Speaker 1: Forgotten Quest to live and work on the ocean floor.
Speaker 1: He described it this way. Dr Bond's breakthroughs were a
Speaker 1: little bit like the diving equivalent of breaking the sound barrier.
Speaker 1: It was a quantum leap in technology over what the
Speaker 1: diving parameters had been for more than a century. Sea
Speaker 1: Lab one, the first iteration of the Sea Lab experiment,
Speaker 1: was housed in a steel tube fifty seven feet long
Speaker 1: that's about seventeen meters that was lowered onto the ocean
Speaker 1: floor off the coast of Bermuda in July nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: four at a depth of a hundred and ninety two
Speaker 1: feet that's about fifty nine Four men successfully stayed submerged
Speaker 1: in this pod for eleven days, and the experiment went
Speaker 1: so well that Sea Lab two was submerged off the
Speaker 1: coast of California at a depth of two hundred and
Speaker 1: five feet that's sixty two mems in August of the
Speaker 1: next year. Sea Lab two had hot showers, a refrigerator,
Speaker 1: and a dolphin named Tuffy trained to deliver supplies and
Speaker 1: rescue aquanuts if necessary. After a thirty days stay in
Speaker 1: Sea Lab two, aquanut and astronauts Scott Carpenter spoke to
Speaker 1: President Lyndon Johnson from his helium atmosphere decompression chamber, sounding
Speaker 1: like a cartoon chipmunk. He might have sounded ridiculous, but
Speaker 1: his three was made. He had survived a month at
Speaker 1: a pressure of one and three p s I, which
Speaker 1: is seven times that of Earth's atmosphere. President Johnson told Carpenter,
Speaker 1: I want you to know that the nation is very
Speaker 1: proud of you. Only a few years later, though, a
Speaker 1: fatal accident on Sea Lab three, which was situated on
Speaker 1: the sea floor off the coast of California at a
Speaker 1: depth of six hundred feet that's a hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: three meters, would shut the program down. Hellworth said most
Speaker 1: people involved were aware that this was a dangerous operation.
Speaker 1: They always knew. It had been Sea Lab one and
Speaker 1: Sea Lab two had gone well with no major injuries.
Speaker 1: After the tragedy on Sea Lab three, they all expected
Speaker 1: to press on, but the Navy didn't see it that way,
Speaker 1: so the program was canceled. It was still a low
Speaker 1: profile enough program that there wasn't a national uproar about
Speaker 1: giving up the race to the bottom of the ocean
Speaker 1: that you would expect if they had tried to cancel
Speaker 1: the Space program two years earlier after the Apollo one
Speaker 1: launch pad fire that killed three astronauts. I think everyone
Speaker 1: expected the program to go on, but for various reasons,
Speaker 1: it didn't. We still use the technical breakthroughs George Bond
Speaker 1: pioneered with the Sea Lab program, mostly in the oil industry,
Speaker 1: setting up oil platforms. Saturation divers can go to a
Speaker 1: job site hundreds of feet below the surface and stay
Speaker 1: down there for an entire eight hour shift. It's a
Speaker 1: dangerous job, but it can pay around fourteen hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a day. Most of us have those saturation divers to
Speaker 1: thank for the fuel in our gas tanks. But George
Speaker 1: Bond's vision was not just industrial, it was military and
Speaker 1: civilian and scientific. He solved the problem of going deeper
Speaker 1: and staying longer. But after Sea Lab was canceled, it
Speaker 1: turned out the industry is where the money was. Any
Speaker 1: military application equipping military submarines to release saturation divers as
Speaker 1: spies during the Cold War, for instance, would be highly
Speaker 1: classified and therefore are hard to document. But there is
Speaker 1: one place on Earth where a Sea Lab type facility
Speaker 1: still exists for scientific research, the Aquarius Reef base south
Speaker 1: of the Florida Keys, and it's been an operation for
Speaker 1: over twenty years. Scientists can go down there sixty feet
Speaker 1: that's eighteen meters below the surface and live anywhere from
Speaker 1: a few days to a couple of weeks running experiments
Speaker 1: on the reef. Hellworth said Dr Bond's vision was science related.
Speaker 1: He thought we ought to have sea lab like bases
Speaker 1: set up in the ocean wherever there might be something
Speaker 1: of interest to study and observe. We should get to
Speaker 1: know that environment better because there's value to spending time
Speaker 1: in the ocean, just like there was value in Jane
Speaker 1: Goodall's being able to sit and observe in the jungle.
Speaker 1: Once you're down there and can stay a while, you
Speaker 1: really don't know what you're going to see. That's how
Speaker 1: we discover things. Today's episode was written by Jesceline Shields
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other
Speaker 1: pressurized topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.