Laine Smith’s 7th Period Class Asks…
How do you get oxygen down to the habitat?
We have compressors on a buoy above the habitat which pump air down to storage bottles around the habitat. We then have a steady vent of air from these storage bottles into the habitat which displaces habitat atmosphere out of the wet porch. We like to say that the wet porch ‘burps’ as it exits the habitat. We also have carbon dioxide scrubbers in the habitat and therefore the habitat could be described as a ‘semi-closed circuit rebreather’.
Air contains 21% oxygen, so as the air flows in it adds oxygen to the atmosphere. Of course, the Aquanauts are continuously metabolizing oxygen and as a result, a balance develops between the rate of oxygen addition and the rate of metabolization which results in a steady state oxygen content of approximately 20%.
We don’t quite understand the predation experiment. Can you tell us about the setup? Besides just starting to learn about marine science, we are also currently discussing scientific testing processes.
A series of platforms is set up on the reef. On each platform there are two sponges. One sponge sits in the open, exposed to the marine environment (including predators), while the other sponge is protected from predators by a cage. Numerous sponge pairs have been deployed in this manner and by comparing what happens over time to the protected and unprotected sponges we can see what effect the predators have.
Do you have television there?
We do not have television in Aquarius, but we could easily add this if it was ever needed or requested using special network encoders and decoders.
A student is asking about oxygen and/or nitrogen in your tanks. Can you tell us about how your tanks are set up on individuals?
When diving from Aquarius we always breathe compressed air. Each Aquanaut who SCUBA dives from the habitat wears two large SCUBA bottles on their back with redundant pressure regulators and supply hoses. Sometimes we also dive from the habitat with air supplied from an umbilical connected back to the habitat. In this case the Aquanaut wears an emergency bottle on their back.
When diving from our surface boats, we usually use air in single SCUBA bottles, but sometimes we use “Enriched Air Nitrox” which is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen which contains a greater percentage of oxygen then that of normal air.
Can you Skype underwater? How quick is internet access?
We can Skype from inside Aquarius. We also have the capability to Skype (but text only) from our underwater stations if we needed that ability. Aquarius internet access is very high speed thanks to the Motorola Point-to-Point bridge between the Life Support Buoy and our Base of Operations in Key Largo. We have DS3 (45 Megabits/second) which provides extremely fast connectivity to the internet.