A World Without Sun
JA
April 26
Jacques Cousteau’s oceanic experiment off the coast of Sudan in the early 1960s has already been well documented, yet the first I heard of it was through this article on Abitare earlier last week. In short, the project consisted of having six oceanauts live on the floor of the Red Sea at a depth of 10 metres for a period of 30 days without surfacing. They stayed in two structures – the aptly named ‘Starfish house’ and a smaller, saucer-like submarine which could go to a further depth of 30 metres.
Anything to do with the sea has always held some kind of strange fascination for me – from Hemingway’s brief novella right up to Tim Winton’s Breath - so I suppose that, in part, is why I find Cousteau’s adventure so intriguing. Another reason I think is the effect that the passing decades have had on the endeavour – these pictures from National Geographic and from World Beneath the Sea by James Dugan could almost be the stuff of an old sci-fi cover. This description too felt as if it belonged to that genre:
The house worked like a steel lung, a spherical dome whose habitable space was separated from the sea by just a liquid door created solely by the air pressure inside the house. The door was both a screen and a threshold between outside (the sea) and inside (the house)…
The structure is apparently still there, totally overgrown and barnacled.
From World Beneath The Sea by James Dugan, 1967
From National Geographic, April 1964, 'At Home in the Sea' by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
From National Geographic, April 1964, 'At Home in the Sea' by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
From National Geographic, April 1964, 'At Home in the Sea' by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
From National Geographic, April 1964, 'At Home in the Sea' by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Images vis Corey Jackson
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