There are robotic explorers beneath the waves at this very moment, allowing ocean research to be carried out without the need for a human presence. Horton works from a land-based lab with specimens collected using corers and traps guided by ROVs but, she says, most of the specimens she examines are dead on arrival.
"You can gain a hell of a lot of information from a specimen – in fact more than you can probably imagine – but you look at them and think, 'I don't have an understanding of what this animal is doing in life, how they're interacting, how they're feeding, how they're behaving'. I think anyone who works in deep ocean research wants to be able to access the environment and to see it firsthand, to actually see the animals in their natural environment."
This is where human-occupied vehicles (HOVs) come in. HOVs are renowned for their contribution to research breakthroughs, including the discovery of hydrothermal vents and the investigation of the RMS Titanic shipwreck.
However, the sea floor is an ever-changing landscape, says Colley, which poses a challenge when you have limited amount of time to research. "With conventional diving, you go down for a certain amount of time, then you have to decompress on the way back up. This means the time actually gathering samples or doing your work is limited to something like 16 minutes at around 100m (328ft) depth."
When researchers return to the seabed, he says, the tide will often have moved the sand and the work will need to be repeated.
"What [the Sentinels] will allow us to do, is stay for a prolonged period," he says. "It's a more efficient way to operate. Also, if you place them down at 200m, you can use them as a forward operating base."
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However, high pressure, low temperatures and corrosion all pose serious challenges to equipment in the deep ocean. To cope in what is often considered among the most extreme environments on the planet, Deep's Sentinels will be made from the same materials used to make space rockets. Louise Slade, Deep's director of advanced manufacturing says: "We'll be 3D printing with steel and cladding the Sentinels in Inconel".
Inconel, she explains, is a nickel-chromium-based superalloy widely used in the military and aerospace industries – in extreme environments where components are subjected to high temperature, pressure or mechanical loads.
Deep's system of configurable, customisable and flexible subsea habitats will be self-sufficient, powered by renewable energy, with subsea bio-reactors to sustainably deal with waste, and be independent of the surface. The subsea habitats will allow scientists to live at depth for weeks rather than minutes. They will have access to the water through a moon pool (essentially a hole in the floor that leads out into the ocean), as well as dedicated wet and dry labs.
