On the outskirts of Chepstow, on the Welsh border, a group of men and women with diving experience, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building what they want to become an underwater city.
The project is called Deep and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation that, according to the founders of the project, will allow them to establish a “permanent human presence” under the sea from 2027 , as published .
Deep, in addition, is funded by a single anonymous private investor with a lot Deep His management team has not revealed anything, not only about quantity (they only say that it is substantially more than 100 million pounds that are being invested in the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the identity of the investor.
Whoever is the one behind, the size of the investment means that an idea that sounds ambitious seems to be quickly becoming. The chosen place, 20 hectares in Gloudeshire, was once a limestone quarry that flooded in the 1990s and was used by a diving school until 2022. Now, it is becoming a latest generation installation.
This will have accommodation units, a training school and a platform for mini submersible that will take people to habitable spaces in the lake of 80 meters deep, according to the same medium. These underwater units, known as sentries, will be used to train scientists (and, eventually, any other person who has money to rent them) to live under the ocean for much longer than has been achieved before already a greater depth.
“In the 50s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean career, and the space won. It is difficult to reach space, but once you are up there, it is a relatively benign environment,” explains Mike Shackleford, operations director Deep The ocean is quite the opposite: it is quite easy to get to the bottom, but once you are there, “basically, everything wants to kill you,” he jokes.
“However, almost all the oceanographers I have known say: ‘You would surprise you to know what little we know about the ocean,” Shackleford says the British media. And he adds: “That is why someone has to take the first steps to try to develop Some of the technologies that will allow us to descend and study the ocean on-site“.
The idea of the centinelas of Deep is that, initially, people can remain inside up to 28 days in a row, although they pretend that this can extend to months and even more time. “The goal is to live in the ocean forever. Have permanent human settlements in all the oceans of the world,” says Shackleford.
