A Flooded Quarry, a Mysterious Millionaire and the Dream of a New Atlantis
February 04, 2025 at 04:30PMOutside the Welsh town of Chepstow, near the England-Wales border, an underwater human habitat is being built. This ambitious project—called Deep—is being funded by a single anonymous investor, creating the technology and infrastructure necessary to “increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity.” The deep sea, after all, has yet to be conquered: “Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out,” Deep’s chief operating officer tells Lisa Bachelor. For The Guardian, Bachelor goes behind the scenes of the project, which its founders say will “enable them to establish a ‘permanent human presence’ under the sea from 2027.”
Who will stay here? What will they eat? And most importantly, is it safe? Browsing the photographs in the piece, it’s impossible not to recall the Titan tragedy in 2023, when an OceanGate submersible imploded during an expedition.
Bachelor describes an undertaking that’s daring, visionary, but also unsettling.
Deep will offer the same experience but with more sophisticated accommodation, at greater depths, and allow scientists to work at those depths for greater periods of time. Their sentinels will also be able to be redeployed to different places. The idea is that a foundation construction will be attached in the desired location at the required depth and then the sentinels will be lowered down to click into the base like “a ski boot being locked into a ski”, Kernagis says. The basic sentinel houses up to six people but the idea is that multiple sentinels could be attached to potentially form multi-nation, multi-purpose research stations (or perhaps, one day, an underwater village for ordinary people).
In the past, a lot of the early underwater habitats were meant to be redeployable, but it was difficult to do that, so they would be put down in one place and stay there for years. “You’re restricting what marine science you can do if you can only do it from one place,” Kernagis says.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/04/a-flooded-quarry-a-mysterious-millionaire-and-the-dream-of-a-new-atlantis/
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