Jessica Fain and Bruce Cantrell slowly emerged from the cool water on Monday. They had just spent a record-breaking 73 days living in an underwater habitat; the early afternoon sun that greeted them in Florida was a revelation.
“It’s warm!” added Fain, who is an adjunct professor at the Tennessee school.
More than two months ago, the community college professors dove beneath the surface aiming to set a new world record for the longest time spent living underwater, all the while teaching from their “Classroom Under the Sea.”
The task required a combination of social isolation and physical endurance, living under pressure and breathing in a mix of gases that substitute for the air they were used to on the surface.
Their new habitat, the Jules Undersea Lodge at Key Largo Undersea Park, was cozy, to say the least.
The professors — he is 63, she is 25 — slept in 10-by-8-foot air-conditioned cylinders that served as bedrooms. Windows gave them a glimpse of underwater life — and marine life was able to peer into the facility. Their air, water and and power were pumped in through an “umbilical cord” connected to the Command Center on land.
At only about 25 feet below the surface, land was always tantalizingly close. But no matter how tempting, they set out to break the record set in 1992 by “aquanaut” Richard Presley, who held the world record after spending 69 days underwater.
If they succeeded, Fain would also blow past the world record for a woman living underwater, which was set in 1970 by scientist Sylvia Earle, who spent 14 days underwater.
“We worked through just about every scenario we could think of,” Cantrell told Knox news just before their mission began in October. “There are only two ways we’ll come out of the habitat early: Either catastrophic equipment failure or a serious medical condition.”
“If we get sick, we’re just going to quarantine each other in the habitat,” Fain added to Nashville Public Radio.
They were joined by a few guests during their time underwater, including legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who had trained for his space mission in underwater conditions not unlike the ones Fain and Cantrell experienced during their 2 1/2-month mission.
They recorded nine episodes of “Classroom Under the Sea,” which were posted on YouTube, and hosted Web chats with students across the country.
“Going in, we had goals that we wanted to accomplish,” Cantrell said, according to a Roane State news release. “At the end of 73 days, I think we’ve exceeded those goals. We’ve reached a lot of people. Now the challenge for us is to carry that forward.”
Unlike a submarine, which creates a surface-like environment with the same kind of air and pressure you would find at sea level, “aquanauts” living in the Undersea Lodge breathe in compressed air, which prevents water from rising and flooding the rooms. Living in the lodge for months at a time and returning to the surface can potentially be dangerous.
“We’ve absorbed all the nitrogen that we can in our body for this depth at this pressure,” Cantrell said during one “Underwater Classroom” episode. “So if we just want to pop back up to the surface and go fly on an airplane or something, we could have very serious medical consequences.”
Now that they’ve emerged from the water, both Cantrell and Fain need to decompress for up to 24 hours, a process of acclimation to the pressure change of being on the surface; decompression will also flush their systems of the nitrogen build up.
But first, they were feted: Among those waiting to greet Cantrell and Fain after their underwater stint was Presley, the former record holder.
“It’s exciting to see the focus more on education and using technology to involve more students,” Presley said in a news release. “We didn’t have that technology in ’92.”
The record-setting mission was a success, Fain declared upon resurfacing, because of the attention it brought to an important issue.
“I really hope that people take away from this that the oceans are something that we need to protect,” she said. “We need to learn more about the oceans and how they work.”
