The French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea announced Tuesday that its submarine, the Nautile, will continue its activity. It is one of the few submersibles in the world that can descend so deep with a crew on board.
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The Nautile, a scientific submarine and jewel of Ifremer, the French Institute dedicated to the oceans, will continue to dive into the depths. The small submersible was supposed to complete its mission in 2025 and end up in the garage. Finally, it will continue at least until 2035, Ifremer announced on Tuesday, September 3, and this is thanks to an extension from the State. In 40 years of existence, the Nautile has explored territories that are still very little known. It is and will therefore remain a major asset for Ifremer and French ocean research.
The small yellow submarine can go down to six kilometers deep, where light no longer passes through the water, where it is pitch black and where the pressure is 600 kilos per cm². Pierre-Marie Sarradin, a researcher at Ifremer and a specialist in deep marine ecosystems, has dived 11 times aboard the Nautile: “First, you have to imagine that you put three people in a sphere that is about 2.20m in diameter. It’s a small space. The first dive, you’re not completely reassured but you’re so excited by this feeling of being an explorer that you forget this little anxiety a little.”.
The submersible offers scientists a rare privilege. Only five devices in the world (in France, the United States, China, Japan and Russia) can descend to such depths with a crew. “The nautilus part will allow us to be physically present, whereas with robots, we are present remotely, through a screen. Direct vision is still important because it really gives us this notion of scale, this notion of third dimension. It doesn’t bring the same perception at all.”explains Pierre-Marie Sarradin.
Compared to a robot, the Nautile is also more manoeuvrable and can carry larger samples to better study the abysses and their little-known ecosystems around marine hydrothermal vents. The objective, according to the Ifremer researcher, is to identify very concrete applications.
“It’s about understanding how the ocean works, how these ecosystems work.”
Pierre-Marie Sarradin, researcher at Ifremerto franceinfo
“For hydrothermal sources, we see that this hydrothermal fluid is enriched in metals which are becoming rare and which are very useful for the development of new technologies. These deep seabeds can therefore potentially provide a new resource that would be impossible to study only from the surface.”analyzes Pierre-Marie Sarradin. He also hopes to discover new molecules with potential medical applications.
The Nautile, which explored the wreck of the Titanic from 1987 to 1998, plugged the leaks of an oil tanker that sank off the coast of Spain in the early 2000s, also participated in the search for debris from the Rio-Paris flight in the depths of the Atlantic.