Living Underwater with Dr. Marc O’Griofa

Dr. Marc O’Griofa has led an amazing life. Originally from Ireland, he’s been around the world not once but twice. He’s been cave diving and diving with sharks, even cage diving with Great Whites off the southern coast of Australia. He’s gone skydiving over an extinct volcano in Hawaii. But for all his adventures, what’s his most memorable adventure?

Living and working on the Aquarius Habitat. He says that nothing will ever top that. What’s it like to do that? There are some similarities to the world topside, but a lot of differences.

First, how long does it take to get down to Aquarius? Although the distance from the water’s surface to Aquarius never changes, the trip there and back isn’t always the same. If you’re just going in for a “hop & pop,” a trip lasting less than an hour, each way takes 10 or 15 minutes (it’s possible to go faster, but that’s hard on your body, especially your ears). But if you’re an Aquanaut spending two weeks in the Hab, the trip down might be fast, but getting ready to go back up to the surface takes 18 hours of depressurization. The entire Hab essentially turns into a hyperbaric chamber so everyone can readjust to the lower pressure back at the surface.

Getting dressed to go to the office is more involved when your “office” is a coral reef 65 feet underwater. In addition to the standard wetsuit, aquanauts also wear dive booties to protect their feet, a weight belt, and a specially made stainless steel diving helmet with a camera and communication devices built in. Safety checks are crucial, both before leaving the Hab and again once everyone is out in the water, and they take at least 15 minutes.

Days on the Hab are beyond busy. Everyone generally wakes up between 5:30 and 6AM. You get half an hour for meals, unless you’re so busy with an experiment that you don’t have time to eat. After a full day of work, everyone crashes into their bunks around 10:30 or 11PM. Well . . . not everyone. Not always. Dr. O’Griofa says that at night, the area outside the Hab becomes a different universe. That’s when the predators become more active; lately, in fact, bull sharks have been roaming the waters around the Hab. Whether the outer lights are on or natural bioluminescence is providing the light, it’s quite a show—one worth staying up late for.

Of course, things don’t always go smoothly. Dr. O’Griofa’s first scientific experiment on the Hab was to run through a DNA sequencing procedure. The procedure itself was 40 pages long, and the experiment was scheduled to take eight hours. About halfway through, after meticulously following each step, he got a call from Mission Control with an odd question: had he turned the gene sequencer on? He looked at the back of the machine and saw a power switch—still in the off position. At that point, the work that he had done was useless. There wasn’t enough time that day to start over, either. He felt bad, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, but something valuable was learned from that situation. The procedure hadn’t specified that he needed to turn the sequencer on. NASA’s procedures are very rigorous and must be followed to the letter, so discovering the missing step and fixing the procedure before it went up to the ISS was a tremendous benefit.

What did Dr. O’Griofa miss the most while he was in the Hab? Fresh food. The Hab can’t have a stove or refrigerator, so the Aquanauts live mostly on camp food, which gets monotonous very quickly. Once, the top side team took pity on them, and sent down a pizza in large zip-top bags. It was the best thing they ate all week. But now that the situation is reversed, what does Dr. O’Griofa miss most about being at Aquarius? His team. He says that his crew was the most amazing group of people, and the camaraderie they shared was incredible. Yes, they keep in touch. That kind of bond never fades.

If you’re interested in asking Dr. O’Griofa any questions of your own, be sure to submit them before our next livestream (look at the sidebar on the left side of the screen for the submission form), and he’ll get to as many of them as he can!

 

Source:

Dr. Marc O’Griofa – Personal Interview September 2018

 

 

Curriculum Reference Links

  • Nature of Science / Understanding About Science / 1:  Students should be able to appreciate how scientists work and how scientific ideas are modified over time


Young Scientist Spotlight:
HANNAH HERBST

10 Fun Facts: The Hab

1. Aquarius is the the world’s only permanent undersea research station.

2. Most missions last about two or three weeks.

3. Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau, beat his grandfather’s record month-long underwater expedition by spending 31 days on the Aquarius Reef Base in 2014.

4. The lab is used by NASA, the US Navy, and researchers and educators from around the globe for training and research.

5. The internet connection is better in the Hab than at many places above the water.

6. You have to swim underneath the facility in order to enter it.

7. Crew members are called aquanauts (NOT aquaNUTS!)

8. In 1994, a crew of scientists and divers had to evacuate Aquarius and climb up a rescue line to the surface in 15-foot seas after one of the habitat’s generators caught fire.

9. Aquarius was featured in the comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon in 2012.

10. The Hab was originally built in Texas.

10 Fun Facts: Coral

1. Reefs usually grow up on the east shore of land masses.

2. Parts of a coral reef can be harvested to make medications to treat cancers and other illnesses.

3. A coral reef isn’t a single organism; it’s actually a community of life that lives and thrives in one location.

4. Only about one percent of the world’s oceans contain coral reefs. That’s about the size of France.

5. Coral reefs are the largest biological structures on earth.

6. Corals are related to jellyfish and anemones.

7. There are over 2,500 species of corals. About 1,000 are the hard corals that build coral reefs.

8. Reefs grow where there are stronger wave patterns and currents to deliver food and nutrients.

9. The Great Barrier Reef is 500,000 years old.

10. Most coral reefs grow just about two centimeters per year.

10. Most coral reefs grow just about two centimeters per year.

10 Fun Facts: Invasive Species

1. To be considered invasive, a species must adapt to a new area easily. It must reproduce quickly. It must harm property, the economy, or the native plants and animals of the region.

2. Some invasive species are introduced accidentally, but others are brought deliberately.

3. Ship ballast water transports between 3,000 and 7,000 foreign species daily around the globe.

4. The total loss to the world economy as a result of invasive non-native species has been estimated at 5% of annual production

5. Invasive species have contributed to 40% of the animal extinctions that have occurred in the last 400 years.

6. Rodents are some of the worst invasive species.

7. There are an estimated 50,000 wild ring-necked parakeets in parks across London and southeast England.

8. Black and Norway rats annually consume stored grains and destroy other property valued over $19 billion.

9. Northern Pacific seastars reproduce very quickly. In one area where they were introduced, their population reached an estimated 12 million seastars in just two years.

10. Starlings were introduced to New York in the late 1800s, as part of an attempt to bring animals that were mentioned in Shakespeare‘s work to America.

Alert: Cuteness Overload!

Cutest animal in the ocean? Keep your Sea Otter. Forget the Dumbo Octopus. Axolotl? Close, but no cigar.

The winner of the Cutest Sea Animal prize is the Leaf Sheep Slug.

Yes, a slug. This tiny (5mm) animal, found near the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan, looks like a cartoon sheep covered in bright green leaves with pinkish purple tips.

Bonus: it’s one of the only animals that can perform photosynthesis, thanks to all the algae it eats.

Beat that.

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