Not only was the Curasub real, it took paying tourists down to 1000 feet. One, found near the surface, was the larva of the other, discovered in a deep reef off the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao by Smithsonian scientists riding in something called the Curasub. Then last spring I wrote about two fish that turned out to be one fish.

My dream seemed to be drifting out of reach. My impression - and I could be wrong - is that seats on those coveted submersible trips are getting fewer and harder to come by, even if someone deemed me dive-worthy. Research vessels have been retired and not replaced. In these days of near-universal government budget cuts to science, marine science, never a US government darling, has taken a hit. My 'plan' was that someone would see my blog, be suitably (of course) impressed, and forthwith offer me a seat and the job of describing the experience on their next deep submersible dive. Obviously, these solutions are for the few.īut what about the rest of us? Are there any tourist subs that can take you there? It wasn't a possibility I'd ever considered before this spring. Or you could build your own, if you have lots of time - and still a considerable amount of money - on your hands and are willing to risk riding to the deep sea in your own creation. There are an array of submarines available for purchase, provided you have a few million dollars on hand. But what about the deep sea? You can obviously buy a submarine if you have access to a comfortably padded trust fund to or other loaded bank account. There are several tourist submarines that can take you to the same depths that recreational divers can reach - but why bother? Diving is so much better. He read it one page at a time and would tear each waterlogged page off when he was finished). Technical divers can extend that to 500 feet or more, but this requires a dizzying array of tanks with different gas blends, a mind like a steel trap to keep all the switching between them straight in the disorienting depths, and the patience of a tortoise to endure the decompression times needed to safely ascend (a cave diver whose talk I attended who'd gone to 800 feet or so kept copies of Popular Science at his multi-hour decompression stop. Although I got certified to dive in 2010, most recreational divers can't explore more than about 120 feet down due to the amount of air you need to keep your lungs pressurized at depth and to nitrogen narcosis, an intoxication by nitrogen that starts to set in around that depth (most of our atmosphere is nitrogen, not oxygen). Instead of needing to be shot into the sky by thousands of pounds of rocket fuel, all you need is a pressure-safe tube with its buoyancy properly adjusted. To me, the ocean is by far the more mysterious and exciting frontier, and it's conveniently located right here on Earth. For most private citizens, travelling more than 100 or so feet below the surface of the ocean is nearly impossible, and yet we are already selling tickets for commercial space tourists. As you read this, I am finally achieving it.īut it wasn't easy to figure out how. In fact, one of the reasons that I started this blog was the hope that as a respectable science blogger/journalist, someone might consider me worthy of taking along on one of their research dives to the deep. As marine biologist (and co-sighter of the first underwater giant squid) Edith Widder says in one of her many fascinating TED talks, 'if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes - a thousand times, yes - and please turn out the lights.

If you read this blog regularly or have ever watched a documentary about the deep sea, you understand why. Click image for source.įor at least the last 15 years, I have dreamed of travelling to the deep sea. Image ID: expn1292, Credit: Lophelia II 2010: Oil Seeps and Deep Reefs. A large ophiuroid starfish with a beautifully colored white and red central disc on an orange 'black' whip coral.

We need to go deeper starfish