aquanaut

Aquanaut Josef Schmid working outside the Aquarius underwater laboratory in 2007.

An Aquanaut is any individual who remains underwater, exposed to the ambient pressure, long enough to come into equilibrium with his or her breathing media. Usually this is done in an underwater habitat on the seafloor for a period equal to or greater than 24 continuous hours without returning to the surface. The term is often restricted to scientists and academics, though there were a group of military aquanauts during the SEALAB program. Commercial Divers in similar circumstances are referred to as Saturation Divers. An aquanaut is distinct from a submariner, in that a submariner is confined to a moving underwater vehicle such as a submarine that holds the water pressure out. Aquanaut derives from the Latin word aqua ("water") plus the Greek nautes ("sailor"), by analogy to the similar construction "astronaut".

The first human aquanaut was Robert Sténuit, who lived on board a tiny one-man cylinder at 200 feet for 24 hours in September 1962 off Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera.^[1][2][3] Military aquanauts include Robert Sheats, Shorty Lyons, Mike Meisky, Robert Croft, Billie L. Coffman, George Dowling, Bill Tolbert, and Wally Jenkins, author Robin Cook, and astronauts Scott Carpenter and Alan Shepard. Civilian aquanaut Berry L. Cannon died of carbon dioxide poisoning during the U.S. Navy's SEALAB III project.^[4]

Scientific aquanauts include Richard Cooper, Stephen Neudecker, Al Waterfield, Jonathan Helfgott, Robert Dill, Sylvia Earle, Ian Koblick, Neil Monney, Chris Olstad, Joseph B. MacInnis^[5], John Perry, Harold "Wes" Pratt (on whom the character "Winch" in Jaws was based), Phillip Sharkey, Dick Rutkowski, Alina Szmant, Bill High, Phil Nuytten, Matthew Morgan, Steven Miller, Morgan Wells, C. Lavett Smith and about 700 others, including the crewmembers of NASA's NEEMO missions at the Aquarius underwater laboratory.

References

• Cousteau, Jacques, World Without Sun.
• Flemming, N. C. and Max, M. D., ed. Code of Practice for Scientific Diving: Principles for the Safe Practice of Scientific Diving in Different Environments. UNESCO Technical Papers in Marine Science 53. 
• Hellwarth, Ben (2012). Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-4745-0. 
• Joiner, James T., ed. (2001). NOAA Diving Manual: Diving for Science and Technology, Fourth Edition. U.S. Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service. ISBN 0-941332-70-5. 
• Miller, James W.; Koblick, Ian G. (1995). Living and Working In the Sea. Best Publishing Company. ISBN 1-886699-01-1. 

External links

• Watch Arctic IV, a 1975 documentary about Joseph MacInnis' dive beneath Arctic ice
• Aquanauts - Heroes of Oceanic Exploration Media images of being an aquanaut.

See also

• Conshelf
• SEALAB
• Aquarius
• NEEMO