Oceans cover more than two thirds of the earth’s surface. But while almost every inch of the land has been tracked, mapped, and photographed to the inch, the deep sea remains remarkably unknown. According to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), more than eighty percent of the oceans remain unexplored. “The oceans are so huge, and so difficult to explore,” explains the explorer Ghislain Bardout.
That is particularly true under the Poles, where the extreme cold and harsh conditions repel all but the hardiest scientists. Bardout and his wife Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout know those waters as well as anyone. In 2010, the Bardouts led the first “Under The Pole” expedition, leading a team across the Arctic ice close to the North Pole. There, over a period of several weeks, a number of divers and scientists conducted 51 dives—breaking records, and recording a hit documentary. Since then, the French explorers have led numerous expeditions to some of the most extreme dive environments on the planet, and witnessed the effects of climate change first-hand: From the retreat of Arctic glaciers in Spitsbergen, Norway and the shrinking of the sea-ice season in Greenland, to the northern migration of fish, and the weakening of the winter sea-ice, which has made ice-landings for aircraft nearly impossible. “Our 2010 expedition ‘Under The Pole I’ would not be feasible today,” Ghislain says.
In 2014, the team undertook a second expedition, “Under The Pole II”, during which they set a world record for sub-ice dives in Greenland. For “Under The Pole III”, a multi-year project that took place between 2017 and 2021, the Bardout’s broadened their focus beyond the poles to focus on the mesophotic zone, the poorly studied twilight realm, loosely defined as between 30m and 200m below the surface. In 2019, Bardout and two fellow divers on the “Under The Pole III” expedition collected the deepest specimen of mesophotic coral ever discovered, Leptoseris hawaiiensis, 172m below the waters of French Polynesia.
“The mesophotic zone is really a huge source of curiosity and inspiration. As it is complicated to access, it has remained widely unknown,” Bardout says. “In fact, we know nearly nothing about the complexity and richness of the life of the oceans. This is why as divers, as expedition leaders, we decided to concentrate on the scientific study of those ecosystems of the mesophotic zone with the overarching goals of scientific knowledge and conservation.”
Ghislain has always had a deep affinity for the ocean. Growing up in France, he first started diving on holidays off the coast of Brittany. It was through diving that he met Emmanuelle, a boat skipper and fellow passionate diver. The pair married in 2013, and have two children, Robin and Tom, who uniquely accompany the family on their expeditions around the world. “Since the very beginning, it was clear for us that it would be something we would build together and accomplish also as a family. It’s a choice of lifestyle, because it was the only way to perform long expeditions whilst keeping a personal life,” Ghislain explains.
Today, Robin and Tom are ten and six years old. “Both have spent half of their life onboard the WHY [a dedicated converted schooner], on expeditions in the Arctic, the Atlantic, or in the Pacific,” he says. (They have a nanny to help.) How do they manage? “It is quite simple to have them with us during the expeditions, probably because they are used to it since day one, but also because all the team love them! They are part of the story and contribute to the great atmosphere we have in the team.”
Since its inception, the “Under The Pole” and DeepLife expeditions have had to deploy innovative technology to achieve their aims. “Rebreathers combined with powerful scooters have revolutionized our capacity to make deep scientific dives since the 2000s. Safer, and enabling long dives, those are real breakthrough technologies for our work. More recently, we developed underwater heating systems with one of our technical partners, which is another revolution in polar diving capacities. It almost allows us the same dive time in polar regions as under the tropics,” Ghislain says. The Bardout family and their team run off the WHY, which carries their gear between expedition sites. They are currently developing an event more capable boat, the WHY NOT, which will be custom-made to house a full expedition team, a decompression chamber, two marine biology labs, and a CAPSULE underwater observatory. This habitat is designed to house divers over long observation periods, at hitherto inaccessible depths.
“Our objective was to break down the time limit that divers face underwater, and put this tool and this huge amount of extra time given by saturation diving to the service of science,” Ghislain says. “It had to be autonomous, only connected to the dry land by a surface antenna for safety communications, but also easy to deploy and leaving not trace in the environment, while also being relatively low operational complexity and cost.” In 2019, the team tested the systems with their first saturation dive, spending 72 hours at 20m underwater off the coast of Polynesia.
“Diving and living in the CAPSULE for days and nights was a dream come true and an extraordinary experience which is in fact extremely rare, even more than diving in a submarine,” he says. The team are now planning a second CAPSULE, capable of saturation dives of up to 50m.
The Bardout’s are now embarking on perhaps their most ambitious expedition yet. Dubbed DeepLife, the multi-year program will include dives all over the globe, united by their endeavor to expand our understanding of the oceans’ mesophotic twilight zone. “We just finished the Svalbard expedition, which was the first one of the DeepLife program. We will go to the Canary Islands in the fall, and afterwards the Caribbean in the first months of 2023,” he says. DeepLife is a recognised project under the United Nations’ Decade Of Ocean Science For Sustainable Development, which aims to rapidly advance ocean science.
Like the “Under The Pole” expeditions, DeepLife is supported by Rolex through its Perpetual Planet initiative, which supports individuals and organizations to draw attention to the planet’s fragility and encourage people to design solutions for environmental challenges.
“Their contribution goes far beyond their financial support,” Bardout explains. The company for example has provided access to a wider network of scientists and conservation experts, alongside funding. “Rolex has always inspired us and encouraged us to give our utmost in everything we do, and to always be in a quest for excellence. This is true for all the dives we do.”
For Bardout, exploration still has a vital role in our understanding of the oceans, and the impacts of climate change on a warming earth. “Oceans—and the pole in particular—are part of the heart of the earth. Their health is representative of our capacity to live sustainably,” he says. “This is why the quest for knowledge is so crucial and so essential. Knowledge is the first step to conservation.”
To find out more about Ghislain Bardout and the “Under The Pole” expeditions, visit Rolex.org, or explore our Planet Pioneers series here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
