Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here with a classic episode from our archives.
Speaker 1: This one dives into the amazing scientific research that allowed
Speaker 1: the creation of the underwater Sea Lab project in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and how that technology is still used today.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Even though around
Speaker 1: seventy percent of our planet is covered in saltwater, we
Speaker 1: have a better map of Mars than we do of
Speaker 1: the oceans that sustain virtually every living thing on Earth. Sure,
Speaker 1: ocean exploration is expensive and complicated, but so is space exploration,
Speaker 1: and 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 US Navy in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, was intended to figure out how to
Speaker 1: send divers down into the freezing, high the 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 a stand millions of gallons of water being piled
Speaker 1: on top of us. Divers have to breathe pressurized air,
Speaker 1: which contains inert gases nitrogen mainly the dissolve into the
Speaker 1: bloodstream and tissues, which works out great so long as
Speaker 1: the weight of the entire ocean keeps them compressed. If
Speaker 1: a diver wants to come up to the surface, they
Speaker 1: must do it slowly in order to avoid the gases
Speaker 1: making little bubbles in their blood, migrating to their joints
Speaker 1: and causing decompression sickness sometimes called the bends, which is
Speaker 1: unspeakably painful and sometimes fatal. In the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: a Navy physician named George Bond figured out how to
Speaker 1: let people explore the ocean in a new way through
Speaker 1: a technique called saturation diving. In his laboratory experiments, Bond
Speaker 1: was able to saturate the blood with inert gases like
Speaker 1: helium in such a way that divers could not only
Speaker 1: go deep, they could stay down indefinitely, so long as
Speaker 1: they had the right setup and a shelter, divers could
Speaker 1: become acclimated to a habitat two hundred feet that's sixty
Speaker 1: meters below the surface and free dive even deeper from there.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Ben Helworth, the author of Sea Lab,
Speaker 1: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean floor.
Speaker 1: He described it this way, Doctor 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 one hundred and ninety two
Speaker 1: feet that's about fifty nine meters. Four men successfully stayed
Speaker 1: submerged in this pod for eleven days, and the experiment
Speaker 1: went so well that Sea Lab two was submerged off
Speaker 1: the coast of California at a depth of two hundred
Speaker 1: and five feet that's sixty two meters in August of
Speaker 1: the 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 aquanauts if necessary. After a thirty days stay in
Speaker 1: Sea Lab two, aquanaut 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: history was made. He had survived a month at a
Speaker 1: pressure of one hundred and three psi, which is seven
Speaker 1: times that of Earth's atmosphere. President Johnson told Carpenter, I
Speaker 1: want you to know that the nation is very proud
Speaker 1: of you. Only a few years later, though, a fatal
Speaker 1: accident on Sea Lab three, which was situated on the
Speaker 1: seafloor off the coast of California at a depth of
Speaker 1: six hundred feet that's one hundred and eighty three meters,
Speaker 1: would shut the program down. Hellworth said most people involved
Speaker 1: were aware that this was a dangerous operation. They always
Speaker 1: knew it had been Sea Lab one and Sea Lab
Speaker 1: two had gone well with no major injuries. After the
Speaker 1: tragedy on Sea Lab three, they all expected to press on,
Speaker 1: but the Navy didn't see it that way, so the
Speaker 1: program was canceled. It was still a low profile enough
Speaker 1: programme that there wasn't a national uproar about giving up
Speaker 1: the race to the bottom of the ocean that you
Speaker 1: would expect if they had tried to cancel the space
Speaker 1: program two years earlier after the Apollo one launch pad
Speaker 1: fire that killed three astronauts. I think everyone expected the
Speaker 1: program to go on, but for various reasons, it didn't.
Speaker 1: We still use the technical breakthroughs George Bond pioneered with
Speaker 1: the Sea Lab program, mostly in the oil industry, setting
Speaker 1: up oil platforms. Saturation divers can go to a job
Speaker 1: site hundreds of feet below the surface and stay down
Speaker 1: there for an entire eight hour shift. It's a dangerous job,
Speaker 1: but it can pay around fourteen hundred dollars a day.
Speaker 1: Most of us have those saturation divers to thank for
Speaker 1: the fuel in our gas tanks. But George Bond's vision
Speaker 1: was not just industrial, it was military and civilian and scientific.
Speaker 1: He solved the problem of going deeper and staying longer.
Speaker 1: But after Sea Lab was canceled, it turned out the
Speaker 1: industry is where the money was. Any military application equipping
Speaker 1: military submarines to release saturation divers as spies during the
Speaker 1: Cold War, for instance, would be highly classified and therefore
Speaker 1: are hard to document. But there is one place on
Speaker 1: Earth where sea lab type facility still exists for scientific research,
Speaker 1: the Aquarius Reef Base south of the Florida Keys, and
Speaker 1: it's been in operation for over twenty years. Scientists can
Speaker 1: go down there sixty feet that's eighteen meters below the
Speaker 1: surface and live anywhere from a few days to a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks running experiments on the reef. Hellworth said
Speaker 1: doctor Bond's vision was science related. He thought we ought
Speaker 1: to have sea lab like bases set up in the
Speaker 1: ocean wherever there might be something of interest to study
Speaker 1: and observe. We should get to know that environment better
Speaker 1: because there's value to spending time in the ocean, just
Speaker 1: like there was value in Jane Goodall's being able to
Speaker 1: sit and observe in the jungle. Once you're down there
Speaker 1: and can stay a while, you really don't know what
Speaker 1: you're going to see. That's how we discover things. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article Where Have all the
Speaker 1: Aquaauts Gone? The Story of Sea Lab on HowStuffWorks? Dot
Speaker 1: com written by Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts wyaheart Radio, visit the
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