How living and working under the sea fills aquanauts with wonder and awe. The phenomenon is called the “underview effect.”
The mind-blowing effect experienced living underwater is similar to that of astronauts in space, research finds
The feeling of awe and planetary connection experienced by astronauts observing Earth from low space orbit is known as the “overview effect,” a term coined by Frank White, the author of numerous books on space exploration and science.
Now researchers from Northeastern University have documented a similar cognitive shift among aquanauts, people who live and work under the sea, which they are calling the “underview effect.”
Sharing that sense of wonder and kinship with nature with the public could be key to helping understand and conserve the ocean environment, according to the research published in Environment & Behavior, an interdisciplinary journal on relationships between environments and human behavior.
“We’re at this juncture where we’re realizing that a business-as-usual approach to how we interact with nature and especially the ocean is just not going to cut it,” said Brian Helmuth, marine and environmental studies professor at Northeastern and one of the authors of the study.
With every other breath people take coming from a marine organism, using the ocean as a dumping ground without regard to its health, bodes ill not just for the planet but for humanity, he said.
“Unless we reframe the way we interact with the ocean, we’re in a lot of trouble,” Helmuth said.
For the study, lead author Kristen Kilgallen, a third-year Ph.D. student at Northeastern, interviewed 14 aquanauts — one of whom is also an astronaut — about the psychological, behavioral and cognitive changes they experienced living underwater for extended periods of time.
“Aquanauts have been very understudied,” said Kilgallen, who said the research is the first of its kind to go beyond the physiological or safety implications of living underwater for days and weeks at a time, a phenomenon known as saturation diving.
What are aquanauts?
Aquanauts are individuals who live and work underwater, using special underwater labs as a home base. Because the pressure is equal inside and outside the underwater station, unlike in submarines, aquanauts can scuba dive outside for eight or more hours a day without needing to take a break to decompress.
“It means you have unlimited time living on the bottom,” said Helmuth, who has participated in a number of aquanaut missions.
Normally, scuba divers can only descend to a depth of 60 feet for 45 minutes before they have to resurface, which gives them limited time to observe the ebb and flow of ocean life, Kilgallen said. Saturation divers, on the other hand, pack their decompression into 24 hours at the end of their underwater stay.
Helmuth compared it to Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist, being able to live in the forest and study chimpanzees, compared to being dropped in by helicopter for 30 minutes at a time.
Awe and transcendence
Even short trips underwater can induce feelings of awe and transcendence, as anybody who has scuba dived or snorkeled on vacation can relate. Being underwater for extended periods amplifies that effect manyfold, Kilgallen said.
“A major shift occurred that was very similar to what astronauts experience, the overview effect,” she said.
The aquanauts reported that living underwater led to heightened perceptions and an amplification of the sense of commitment and connectedness to the natural world, Kilgallen said. Of the respondents, 70% reported heightened awe and gratitude and 64% heightened engagement with their surroundings due to the challenge of living under the seas.
But while aquanauts shared a view with astronauts that everything is connected and interrelated, there “was more of a sense of connectedness to the specific marine environment rather than Earth as a whole,” Kilgallen said.
The aquanauts are literally immersed in their environment, she said. “So it’s sort of this unique relationship.”
The rarified community of aquanauts
Aquanauts themselves are a fairly unique group, who number about 100 living members, said Helmuth, who also counts Northeastern professors Mark Patterson and Geoffrey Trussell among them, as well as Marine and Environmental Sciences staffer Liz Bentley McGee.
Compare that to astronauts, of whom NASA says there are hundreds, including those active and retired. Would-be aquanauts currently face a lack of opportunity to live underwater — although Helmuth hopes that will change soon.
The only currently operating underwater station for research during saturation diving that Helmuth knows of is the Aquarius Reef Base operated off the Florida Keys by Florida International University. “There are other underwater facilities,” he said, “but they are shallower than saturation depth, for example, Jules Verne Lodge.”
Aqaurius was where a team of aquanauts in 2014 lived for 31 days during Mission 31 under the leadership of Fabien Cousteau. He used the occasion to mark the 50th anniversary of his famed grandfather Jacques Cousteau’s 30-day underwater mission, Conshelf II, by going one day longer and twice as deep.
Helmuth and Patterson now serve as chief scientists for Fabien Cousteau’s latest endeavor, Proteus, which calls for a series of large underwater stations to be built that are the undersea equivalent of the International Space Station.
“We have a builder. We have designs,” but are still in the fundraising stage, Helmuth said.
The new study led by Kilgallen is key to developing a deeper understanding of the implications of living underwater in scenarios like Proteus and to translating that experience for the public, Helmuth said.
Editor’s Picks
Magee, who spent 16 days underwater during Mission 31 as Northeastern’s diving safety officer, said saturation diving allowed her to note details she did not normally have time to absorb, whether it was revisiting the tiny hole sheltering a mantis shrimp or hanging out with huge goliath grouper fish, including one the scientists named Sylvia.
“This was my first and only experience” with saturation diving, Magee said. “It was really eye-opening to be able to live and work in an environment I’d only been able to spend short bursts of time in. It created some really meaningful moments.”
It’s amazing to see how marine animals get used to humans they see for hours at a time daily, resuming foraging and predation behaviors that might have been interrupted by brief dives, said Cousteau, a guest scientist at Northeastern who has been diving since age 4.
Looking out of the porthole of an underwater habitat, he’s seen large permit fish devoured by sharks in the darkness of night. He’s been slapped in the back of his diving helmet by bold and curious spotted eagle rays swimming in a squadron-like formation on daily inspections of a habitat.
“You see the dynamic, daily activity in a small region, in an underwater city,” Cousteau said, leading to an “aha” moment of connectivity. “You are all of a sudden immersed into an existential consciousness. You realize the health and beauty of our planet is the health and beauty of ourselves.”
Aquanauts reported that not every moment was transcendent, Kilgallen said. They reported a numbing, almost tipsy effect known as nitrogen narcosis as well as feelings of exhaustion and disrupted circadian rhythms.
“But a lot of them mentioned (the stress) was very much worth it for the work they were doing,” she said. “That almost gave more of a commitment to their role.
