A New Way to Explore the Seas

It has to be one of the weirder crafts to grace a drawing board -- a seahorse-shaped buoy, 51 meters (165 feet) tall, designed not for transport, but to drift around the oceans studying life beneath the waves.

The strange vessel goes by the name of SeaOrbiter, and it is the vision of French marine architect Jacques Rougerie, whose has for decades designed underwater houses and built futuristic ships with transparent hulls.

"SeaOrbiter will be a different way of approaching the underwater world, a human adventure, an explorer's adventure," Rougerie told AFP.

Sea covers two-thirds of the globe, yet it is still the least understood dimension on the world's surface, both in its topography and in the many species that have yet to be discovered or described. The conventional way of examining life beneath the waves -- by scuba or submarine -- is usually brief, uncomfortable and intrusive.

Rougerie's idea is that a drifting vessel, with viewing ports deep beneath sea level, is far smarter. It can be used day and night, and whales, dolphins and other sea creatures, undisturbed by engines or artificial movement, are likely to congregate close by.

"If you see something interesting, all you have to do is to get suited up, quietly open an airlock and swim outside to take a look," the inventor said.

more: dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1596745,00.html (627)

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