WEBVTT - BrainStuff Classics: How Did Sealab Work?

0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.600
<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,

0:00:07.680 --> 0:00:11.160
<v Speaker 1>Lauren Vogel bomb here with a classic episode from our archives.

0:00:11.840 --> 0:00:15.880
<v Speaker 1>This one dives into the amazing scientific research that allowed

0:00:15.880 --> 0:00:19.079
<v Speaker 1>the creation of the underwater Sea Lab project in the

0:00:19.160 --> 0:00:24.400
<v Speaker 1>nineteen sixties and how that technology is still used today.

0:00:25.440 --> 0:00:28.680
<v Speaker 1>Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Even though around

0:00:28.680 --> 0:00:31.200
<v Speaker 1>seventy percent of our planet is covered in saltwater, we

0:00:31.280 --> 0:00:33.040
<v Speaker 1>have a better map of Mars than we do of

0:00:33.080 --> 0:00:36.840
<v Speaker 1>the oceans that sustain virtually every living thing on Earth. Sure,

0:00:36.920 --> 0:00:41.160
<v Speaker 1>ocean exploration is expensive and complicated, but so is space exploration,

0:00:41.240 --> 0:00:44.239
<v Speaker 1>and we do plenty of that. There was a time, though,

0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:47.559
<v Speaker 1>during the early years of space exploration, that aquanauts were

0:00:47.560 --> 0:00:49.920
<v Speaker 1>pushing the limits of how deep humans could dive under

0:00:49.960 --> 0:00:52.240
<v Speaker 1>the ocean and how long they could stay down there.

0:00:52.880 --> 0:00:55.320
<v Speaker 1>Sea Lab, a program launched by the US Navy in

0:00:55.360 --> 0:00:58.000
<v Speaker 1>nineteen sixty four, was intended to figure out how to

0:00:58.040 --> 0:01:00.840
<v Speaker 1>send divers down into the freezing, high the pressure environments

0:01:00.840 --> 0:01:03.120
<v Speaker 1>of the deep sea for longer periods of time than

0:01:03.240 --> 0:01:06.280
<v Speaker 1>anyone had ever thought possible, and the program was a

0:01:06.319 --> 0:01:11.000
<v Speaker 1>big success until it wasn't anymore. It's always challenging to

0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:13.360
<v Speaker 1>get a human body free swimming at any great depth,

0:01:13.560 --> 0:01:15.559
<v Speaker 1>of the reason being that our bodies are not made

0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:18.080
<v Speaker 1>to a stand millions of gallons of water being piled

0:01:18.120 --> 0:01:21.360
<v Speaker 1>on top of us. Divers have to breathe pressurized air,

0:01:21.560 --> 0:01:24.960
<v Speaker 1>which contains inert gases nitrogen mainly the dissolve into the

0:01:24.959 --> 0:01:27.960
<v Speaker 1>bloodstream and tissues, which works out great so long as

0:01:28.000 --> 0:01:30.880
<v Speaker 1>the weight of the entire ocean keeps them compressed. If

0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:32.800
<v Speaker 1>a diver wants to come up to the surface, they

0:01:32.840 --> 0:01:35.000
<v Speaker 1>must do it slowly in order to avoid the gases

0:01:35.040 --> 0:01:38.039
<v Speaker 1>making little bubbles in their blood, migrating to their joints

0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:41.240
<v Speaker 1>and causing decompression sickness sometimes called the bends, which is

0:01:41.319 --> 0:01:45.959
<v Speaker 1>unspeakably painful and sometimes fatal. In the early nineteen sixties,

0:01:46.000 --> 0:01:48.560
<v Speaker 1>a Navy physician named George Bond figured out how to

0:01:48.640 --> 0:01:50.920
<v Speaker 1>let people explore the ocean in a new way through

0:01:50.960 --> 0:01:55.360
<v Speaker 1>a technique called saturation diving. In his laboratory experiments, Bond

0:01:55.400 --> 0:01:57.560
<v Speaker 1>was able to saturate the blood with inert gases like

0:01:57.640 --> 0:02:00.000
<v Speaker 1>helium in such a way that divers could not only

0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:02.840
<v Speaker 1>go deep, they could stay down indefinitely, so long as

0:02:02.880 --> 0:02:05.600
<v Speaker 1>they had the right setup and a shelter, divers could

0:02:05.600 --> 0:02:08.359
<v Speaker 1>become acclimated to a habitat two hundred feet that's sixty

0:02:08.400 --> 0:02:11.360
<v Speaker 1>meters below the surface and free dive even deeper from there.

0:02:12.720 --> 0:02:15.600
<v Speaker 1>We spoke with Ben Helworth, the author of Sea Lab,

0:02:15.639 --> 0:02:18.160
<v Speaker 1>America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean floor.

0:02:18.880 --> 0:02:22.400
<v Speaker 1>He described it this way, Doctor Bond's breakthroughs were a

0:02:22.440 --> 0:02:25.240
<v Speaker 1>little bit like the diving equivalent of breaking the sound barrier.

0:02:25.560 --> 0:02:27.760
<v Speaker 1>It was a quantum leap in technology over what the

0:02:27.800 --> 0:02:31.320
<v Speaker 1>diving parameters had been for more than a century. Sea

0:02:31.400 --> 0:02:34.000
<v Speaker 1>Lab one, the first iteration of the Sea Lab experiment,

0:02:34.280 --> 0:02:36.720
<v Speaker 1>was housed in a steel tube fifty seven feet long

0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:39.440
<v Speaker 1>that's about seventeen meters that was lowered onto the ocean

0:02:39.480 --> 0:02:42.400
<v Speaker 1>floor off the coast of Bermuda in July nineteen sixty

0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:44.320
<v Speaker 1>four at a depth of one hundred and ninety two

0:02:44.360 --> 0:02:48.080
<v Speaker 1>feet that's about fifty nine meters. Four men successfully stayed

0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:50.880
<v Speaker 1>submerged in this pod for eleven days, and the experiment

0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:53.200
<v Speaker 1>went so well that Sea Lab two was submerged off

0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:55.320
<v Speaker 1>the coast of California at a depth of two hundred

0:02:55.360 --> 0:02:57.800
<v Speaker 1>and five feet that's sixty two meters in August of

0:02:57.800 --> 0:03:01.520
<v Speaker 1>the next year, Sea Lab two had hot showers, a refrigerator,

0:03:01.600 --> 0:03:04.440
<v Speaker 1>and a dolphin named Tuffy trained to deliver supplies and

0:03:04.560 --> 0:03:08.079
<v Speaker 1>rescue aquanauts if necessary. After a thirty days stay in

0:03:08.160 --> 0:03:11.600
<v Speaker 1>Sea Lab two, aquanaut and astronauts Scott Carpenter spoke to

0:03:11.639 --> 0:03:15.800
<v Speaker 1>President Lyndon Johnson from his helium atmosphere decompression chamber. Sounding

0:03:15.840 --> 0:03:18.880
<v Speaker 1>like a cartoon chipmunk. He might have sounded ridiculous, but

0:03:19.000 --> 0:03:21.240
<v Speaker 1>history was made. He had survived a month at a

0:03:21.240 --> 0:03:24.000
<v Speaker 1>pressure of one hundred and three psi, which is seven

0:03:24.040 --> 0:03:28.200
<v Speaker 1>times that of Earth's atmosphere. President Johnson told Carpenter, I

0:03:28.240 --> 0:03:30.120
<v Speaker 1>want you to know that the nation is very proud

0:03:30.160 --> 0:03:33.359
<v Speaker 1>of you. Only a few years later, though, a fatal

0:03:33.400 --> 0:03:35.720
<v Speaker 1>accident on Sea Lab three, which was situated on the

0:03:35.720 --> 0:03:37.680
<v Speaker 1>seafloor off the coast of California at a depth of

0:03:37.720 --> 0:03:39.920
<v Speaker 1>six hundred feet that's one hundred and eighty three meters,

0:03:40.080 --> 0:03:44.600
<v Speaker 1>would shut the program down. Hellworth said most people involved

0:03:44.600 --> 0:03:46.960
<v Speaker 1>were aware that this was a dangerous operation. They always

0:03:47.000 --> 0:03:49.080
<v Speaker 1>knew it had been Sea Lab one and Sea Lab

0:03:49.160 --> 0:03:51.840
<v Speaker 1>two had gone well with no major injuries. After the

0:03:51.840 --> 0:03:54.840
<v Speaker 1>tragedy on Sea Lab three, they all expected to press on,

0:03:55.080 --> 0:03:56.840
<v Speaker 1>but the Navy didn't see it that way, so the

0:03:56.840 --> 0:03:59.640
<v Speaker 1>program was canceled. It was still a low profile enough

0:03:59.640 --> 0:04:02.280
<v Speaker 1>programme that there wasn't a national uproar about giving up

0:04:02.280 --> 0:04:03.920
<v Speaker 1>the race to the bottom of the ocean that you

0:04:03.960 --> 0:04:05.800
<v Speaker 1>would expect if they had tried to cancel the space

0:04:05.840 --> 0:04:08.680
<v Speaker 1>program two years earlier after the Apollo one launch pad

0:04:08.760 --> 0:04:11.880
<v Speaker 1>fire that killed three astronauts. I think everyone expected the

0:04:11.880 --> 0:04:14.560
<v Speaker 1>program to go on, but for various reasons, it didn't.

0:04:15.440 --> 0:04:18.120
<v Speaker 1>We still use the technical breakthroughs George Bond pioneered with

0:04:18.160 --> 0:04:20.839
<v Speaker 1>the Sea Lab program, mostly in the oil industry, setting

0:04:20.880 --> 0:04:23.960
<v Speaker 1>up oil platforms. Saturation divers can go to a job

0:04:24.000 --> 0:04:26.320
<v Speaker 1>site hundreds of feet below the surface and stay down

0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:29.279
<v Speaker 1>there for an entire eight hour shift. It's a dangerous job,

0:04:29.320 --> 0:04:31.360
<v Speaker 1>but it can pay around fourteen hundred dollars a day.

0:04:31.920 --> 0:04:34.040
<v Speaker 1>Most of us have those saturation divers to thank for

0:04:34.080 --> 0:04:37.679
<v Speaker 1>the fuel in our gas tanks. But George Bond's vision

0:04:37.800 --> 0:04:41.800
<v Speaker 1>was not just industrial, it was military and civilian and scientific.

0:04:42.360 --> 0:04:45.039
<v Speaker 1>He solved the problem of going deeper and staying longer.

0:04:45.240 --> 0:04:47.400
<v Speaker 1>But after Sea Lab was canceled, it turned out the

0:04:47.400 --> 0:04:51.000
<v Speaker 1>industry is where the money was. Any military application equipping

0:04:51.040 --> 0:04:54.040
<v Speaker 1>military submarines to release saturation divers as spies during the

0:04:54.040 --> 0:04:57.400
<v Speaker 1>Cold War, for instance, would be highly classified and therefore

0:04:57.480 --> 0:05:00.440
<v Speaker 1>are hard to document. But there is one place on

0:05:00.480 --> 0:05:04.040
<v Speaker 1>Earth where sea lab type facility still exists for scientific research,

0:05:04.360 --> 0:05:07.200
<v Speaker 1>the Aquarius Reef Base south of the Florida Keys, and

0:05:07.240 --> 0:05:10.400
<v Speaker 1>it's been in operation for over twenty years. Scientists can

0:05:10.400 --> 0:05:12.760
<v Speaker 1>go down there sixty feet that's eighteen meters below the

0:05:12.760 --> 0:05:14.960
<v Speaker 1>surface and live anywhere from a few days to a

0:05:15.000 --> 0:05:18.640
<v Speaker 1>couple of weeks running experiments on the reef. Hellworth said

0:05:19.040 --> 0:05:21.880
<v Speaker 1>doctor Bond's vision was science related. He thought we ought

0:05:21.920 --> 0:05:23.719
<v Speaker 1>to have sea lab like bases set up in the

0:05:23.720 --> 0:05:25.960
<v Speaker 1>ocean wherever there might be something of interest to study

0:05:26.000 --> 0:05:28.679
<v Speaker 1>and observe. We should get to know that environment better

0:05:28.800 --> 0:05:31.200
<v Speaker 1>because there's value to spending time in the ocean, just

0:05:31.200 --> 0:05:33.160
<v Speaker 1>like there was value in Jane Goodall's being able to

0:05:33.160 --> 0:05:35.520
<v Speaker 1>sit and observe in the jungle. Once you're down there

0:05:35.560 --> 0:05:37.440
<v Speaker 1>and can stay a while, you really don't know what

0:05:37.520 --> 0:05:44.599
<v Speaker 1>you're going to see. That's how we discover things. Today's

0:05:44.600 --> 0:05:46.720
<v Speaker 1>episode is based on the article Where Have all the

0:05:46.760 --> 0:05:50.000
<v Speaker 1>Aquaauts Gone? The Story of Sea Lab on HowStuffWorks? Dot

0:05:50.040 --> 0:05:53.480
<v Speaker 1>com written by Jesslynshields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio

0:05:53.640 --> 0:05:55.920
<v Speaker 1>in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and is produced

0:05:55.920 --> 0:05:59.279
<v Speaker 1>by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts wyaheart Radio, visit the

0:05:59.279 --> 0:06:02.200
<v Speaker 1>airheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

0:06:02.240 --> 0:06:03.120
<v Speaker 1>your favorite shows.