“DeeSee, DeepSee do you copy?”
“Loud and clear, topside.”
“I’m ready for a set of stats whenever you are.”
We are at 200m deep, and I’m turning my red light on to check the oxygen level and find that we are at the low margin.
I felt how throat was getting drier.
Sweat started beading on my forehead.
I took a deep breath, turned the floating dial counterclockwise and reported, “O2 at 19%, coming up.”
I watched the oxygen levels rising back up to 20.9% and exhaled in relief.
That 2% of difference almost took my breath away.
Astronauts know well that the most precious thing they have while exploring outer space is their life support system so does aquanauts who explore the deep ocean.
You would not only remember to check on it continuously but to take care of it like your life depends on it.
In a submersible, you are continually injecting pure oxygen to the cabin while a carbon dioxide scrubber absorbs the CO2 out of the air, you are providing your own gas and removing your excess.
So even though submarines today are equipped with fans and A/C, the air inside the cabin stays the same after the hatch was closed.
My co-pilots rarely noticed the monitoring process, the sights you get to see in the Mesopelagic zone (which is between approximately 200 to 1000 meters) holds discoveries and species new to science, stunning views of underwater landscapes that will captivate your imagination and will evoke the sensation of being an explorer.
Every year about 27 million tons of African dust fly over the Atlantic ocean and drops from the sky to the Amazon basin, being the perfect fertilizer for the rainforest plants and trees that photosynthesize and turns carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Many people call the rainforest the “lungs of the earth” but unlike what most people think, this precious oxygen doesn’t live the Amazon, its residents are consuming all of it.
So how does the Earth life support system generate the oxygen we breathe?
As water evaporates in the rainforests and creates a river of clouds in the sky, the rain falls, erodes the rock and turning it into sediments.
All those nutrients are flowing into the ocean, helping small organisms called diatoms to reproduce and generate oxygen.
We take about 16 breaths a minute, 23,000 breaths a day, but we take it for granted.
Life in cities could be overwhelming, sprinting from one goal to another, without pausing for a brief moment to think about something as essential as breathing.
Submersibles didn’t only teach me about how to care for oxygen levels underwater. Rather, it presented a microcosmos of how I should never take for granted one of the most spectacular miracles, the only world in our solar system with liquid water on the surface, Liquid water that sustains all life on Earth.
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