1st July 2019: Antonin, Laurent, Thibault and Yanick, locked themselves in the bathyal station* to experiment a new technique of autonomous deep-sea exploration that has now been validated: saturation diving with an electronic rebreather.
28 days of voluntary confinement under 13 bars of pressure, four of them in a living space reduced to a few square meters… Thermal discomfort, extreme promiscuity, altered taste of food, incessant noise, fatigue; these were the conditions to be able to enjoy much longer diving times at these depths, from 60 to 144 m, without having to make very long stops after each dive.
The four aquanauts suffered little or no physical harm from these extreme conditions. They knew that this confinement was the price they had to pay for a new freedom of evolution underwater and new possibilities of observation and work, at depths that are normally difficult to reach for through autonomous scuba diving.
*referring to the bathyal zone which designates the offshore area extending down from the edge of the continental shelf at a depth of approximately 100 to 200 m and the abyssal plain between 2,000 and 2,500 metres in the Mediterranean Sea.