Aquatica Submarine to Conduct Blue Hole Expedition

Aquatica Submarines has teamed up with businessman and philanthropist Richard Branson, documentary filmmaker and ocean conservationist Fabien Costeau and the Roatan Institute of Deep Sea Exploration to do an expedition to the bottom of the Great Blue Hole.  The team will collect scientific data and carry out a sonar scan of the interior of the Blue Hole, as well as a live stream. Two submarines and a support vessel will be used for this first of its kind exploration at the World Heritage Site. The activities will all be conducted during the day time. Today, we spoke with Bryan Price of Aquatica Submarines who shared some of the details of their expedition.

Bryan Price

Bryan Price, Vice President, Aquatica Submarines

“We are going out to the Blue Hole. We are going to do a couple of things. We are going to have a live broadcast from the bottom of the Blue Hole with our special guests, Richard Branson and Fabien Costeau, on Sunday, December second. And with our chief pilot, Erica Berman, we are going to be having a conversation with them to talk about ocean conservation and things that really matter to both of those gentlemen and us in terms of ocean conservation generally, and specifically the Blue Hole and how these things matter to the larger world and how we have to pay more attention to these things to make sure we got them for future generations. When we complete that, we will have the science phase.  We are doing a couple of things. We are going to be building a 3D map of the Blue Hole. So it is a virtual map and that data will be provided to the Belize government for research purposes so they can understand more about the Blue Hole and help contribute to that conservation. We are doing a bathymetric survey with another partner and we are also going to be doing some observational science so we will be embarking fisheries officials and other people like that, students, to go down and really observe things in the Blue Hole that matter to them.   In the fisheries side of the house, what they are looking for—to observe conch populations; to get a feel to how they vary in terms of the different depths that they might not be able to see from regular scuba diving or other means. Overall, we are just doing a lot of observation work to see what really happens in the Blue Hole. We captured a great deal of data just passively with our submarine with various sensors. So we are going to have a really good idea of what goes on in and around the Blue Hole over that time. So it is really two things; it’s an ocean awareness side of the house and then also a very strong science side of the house. We will go diving for a couple hours at a time. The submarine can stay down for a long time; we’ve got tons of air to be down there, but usually people get hungry and they need to come up. So couple of hours at a time; so two to three dives a day—mostly two. So four hours a day under water and then we’ll come up and make sure everything is working, take our data, assemble it and then do it again each day. Part of the reason we do this is because we are not a hundred percent sure.  We know that we’ll see stalagmites in the hole; we know that we are going to sea life but we are not a hundred person sure. But we want to push the limits of exploration in a safe and respectable way. So again, at the end of this, we will know more about the Blue Hole, the country of Belize will know more about the Blue Hole and the people that are going to be managing it, will manage it more appropriately. So we will have the Blue Hole management available for everybody to enjoy for long time to come.”